“Let Us Not Desert One Another”: Women Writing Friendship and Community in the Long Eighteenth Century

“LET US NOT DESERT ONE ANOTHER”: WOMEN WRITING FRIENDSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

KADESH LAURIDSEN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To my son, who is my wonder and my world ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In my life, and in the completion of this work, I have been blessed with the support of a strong, vibrant community of women. My mothers—Pamela Foster, Lois

Mills, and Frances Jackson—have demonstrated throughout my life the virtues of patience, compassion, and unconditional love. My sisters—Tamara Lauridsen, La-Titia

Jackson, and Traci Klass—have been the cheerleaders, the waiting shoulders, and the outstretched hands I’ve needed along the way. My mentor, Judy Page, represents to me the epitome of a true feminist scholar—one whose engagement in empowering women reaches into her teaching, her writing, and her personal relationships. Words are inadequate to express my thanks for her contributions to my understanding of literature, history, gender, and our profession. Most of all, I thank her for giving so selflessly of her time.

I owe the greatest debt of gratitude in the completion of this project to my dear friend, spiritual sister, and intellectual twin Randi Marie Addicott. Her encouragement, multiple readings, reviews, suggestions, and availability for impromptu brainstorming sessions have been indispensable. Randi Marie’s natural sympathy and witty charm embody the best that true women’s friendship has to offer. Our world is brighter because of the sunshine she brings to it.

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 7

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 8

ABSTRACT ...... 9

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: (RE)DEFINING WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP ...... 11

Writing between the Lines ...... 14 Sympathy among Women ...... 21 Blurred Lines: Women’s Friendship, Romantic Friendship, and the “Lesbian Historical Project” ...... 23 The Authors ...... 33 Chapter Summaries ...... 37 An Invitation ...... 40

2 THE LANGUAGE OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP—COMPANIONSHIP AND “SCHEMES OF HAPPINESS” ...... 47

Formal Definitions of Friendship ...... 48 Dr. Johnson and Frances Burney ...... 52 The Language of Character ...... 59 Women in the World – The Language of Masks ...... 69 The Language of Female Friendship – “Schemes of Happiness” ...... 72 Female Companionship—Sympathy of Mind ...... 75 Female Companionship—Sympathy of heart ...... 78 The Language of Emotion ...... 82 Being in the World - Names, Words, and Castles ...... 85

3 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP IN JANE AUSTEN’S COMMUNITIES OF WOMEN ...... 98

Failures of Patriarchy—Women and the Estate ...... 101 Defining Women’s Friendships ...... 106 Women’s Sympathetic Friendship ...... 113 Individual Development within Community ...... 126 False Friends ...... 136 “Think of What She Had Lost” – Absence and Loss of Friendship in Austen’s Later Novels ...... 147 Emma’s “Gentle Sorrow” ...... 150 Women’s Friendship in the World ...... 166

5 4 “PROTECTION AND REGARD”: PARATEXTS AND THE CREATION OF WOMEN’S LITERARY COMMUNITY ...... 168

Community through Friendship ...... 170 The Paratext as Instrument of Change ...... 175 Frances Burney’s Many Voices and Long Life ...... 182 Private Sorrows and Charlotte Smith’s Communal Public Voice ...... 200 Community in Crisis ...... 211

5 (RE)CREATING THE NOVEL: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S REVIEWS, MARIA EDGEWORTH’S LOOSE ENDS, AND FRANCES BURNEY’S LEGACY 214

Wollstonecraft’s Reviews ...... 218 The Compliment of Quotation—Wollstonecraft Takes on Charlotte Smith...... 223 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Evolution of Women’s Novels ...... 236 Writing the Revolutionary Novel – Wollstonecraft’s Prefaces ...... 247 Edgeworth’s Textual Nexus ...... 257 Burney’s Wanderer and the Legacy of the Long Eighteenth Century Women’s Novel ...... 281

6 CODA ...... 292

“A Moral—Yes!” ...... 302

APPENDIX

JANE AUSTEN’S DEFENSE OF THE NOVEL ...... 304

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 306

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 312

6 LIST OF TABLES

Table page

1-1 Table of comparative dates of births, publications, and deaths (1740 – 1850) ...... 44

2-1 Relationship between Edgeworth’s publications and Wollstonecraft’s death ...... 260

7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A In some places Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of VINDICATION Woman has been abbreviated to Rights of Woman. This is to OF THE differentiate it from Wollstonecraft’s work of a similar title, A RIGHTS OF Vindication of the Rights of Man. WOMAN

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

“LET US NOT DESERT ONE ANOTHER”: WOMEN WRITING FRIENDSHIP AND COMMUNITY IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Kadesh Lauridsen

December 2014

Chair: Judith Page Major: English

This study considers women’s friendships and community as they are portrayed in the writings of British women in the long eighteenth century. I make use of the literary works of Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and

Jane Austen in order to establish the way each woman, in her own way, worked toward revising patriarchal structures—social, literary, and familial—by rewriting masculine definitions of friendship. In their novels, women writers responded to these definitions of friendship by foregrounding the sympathetic bond, and the positive, virtuous, improving influences it had on all who experienced it. Their novels comment on three types of women’s relationships: women’s friendships, the intertextual relationship between the heroines of women’s novels, and the socially discursive relationships among women novelists. Although they were courtship novels, these texts focused a great deal on relationships other than the courting pair, reflecting the realities of women’s lives.

Likewise, relationships between the heroines of novels and reflected the lives and friendships of real-life readers. Authors showed solidarity by commending each other’s works in their own. They also interacted with each other and challenged the dominant

masculine discourse of the literary marketplace through the paratextual materials of their works (their prefaces, introductions, forewords, etc.) and their literary reviews.

As I discuss this “sisterhood” of women novelists, I develop a definition of women’s friendship that is constructed intentionally within the novels of a select group of writers. Women writers fleshed out their unique definition of friendship as part of their heroine’s development. By placing this construct of friendship within the dynamic entity of the novel, I demonstrate the ways that both character and author participated in the development of a larger women’s community. In a close examination of masculine and feminine terminology, I emphasize the way women writers redefine the terms of friendship at the level of language, engaging current ideologies on their own ground in the simultaneously public/private space of the novel. Through this mechanism, the novel became a means of agency for women writers and readers, and an implement of social change—toward a more feminist, egalitarian view of relationships.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: (RE)DEFINING WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. … Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

—Jane Austen Northanger Abbey

This direct address by the narrator of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) to the reader comes in a paragraph that begins with a satirical description of the growing friendship between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, who turns out to be a shallow and unreliable foil to Catherine’s far more sympathetic and sensible friend

Eleanor Tilney. Critics frequently refer to the full segment as Austen’s ‘Defense of the

Novel,’ but I see it as much more.1 I consider it a battle cry for the validity of women writers, women readers, and women’s voices. Through it, Austen makes a multi-faceted commentary on three types of women’s relationships: women’s individual and communal friendships, the intertextual relationship between the heroines of women’s

1 I have included the full text of the ‘Defense of the Novel’ in the Appendix.

novels, and the socially discursive relationships among women novelists.2 Ultimately,

Austen’s comments on the “sisterhood” of women novelists point toward the solidarity she hopes to inspire. Austen leads by example—she shows her characters reading

Anne Radcliffe and, perhaps more importantly, she bestows high praise on Frances

Burney and Maria Edgeworth, saying that in their works “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, [and] … the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language” (31). Considering the parodic context of Northanger Abbey, and the broader social context of the eighteenth-century literary market, reality stands in stark contrast to this romantic notion; many women novelists consistently derided one another and themselves in the prefaces of their own works and in reviews of one another’s works.

Viewing the novels in terms of the levels of women’s friendship implied within this scene—separately, and then in various combinations—can uncover some of the less obvious and shared goals these authors possessed. Their most consistently shared goal was to forward the values of sympathy, equality, and community among women,

2 I have chosen the term woman rather than female to avoid any of the gender biases associated with the latter. The authors I deal with in this study were, to the best of our knowledge, women in the biological sense. (I do understand that even the term and act of “biological” gendering is inherently problematic.) Though I do not believe that biological sex has any relationship to an author’s merit, the nature of this study involves the way that perceptions of gender influenced the authors in question. In short, no individual living in the long eighteenth century could escape the binary cultural constructs of male/female, masculine/feminine that were assigned them according to their (assumed) biological sex, nor could they escape the roles and attributes that came with them. As I consider the multi-dimensional relationships between authors, texts, and readers, I have chosen to contextualize my discussions of gender by taking these factors into account. Katherine Green makes a similar point in The Courtship Novel: “female authors found themselves unfairly gauged by a biological essentialism,” rendering them “with analogous qualities to their texts” (3). In this issue, I think I am on solid ground in my ability to discuss perceptions of gender as they were understood within the period. Therefore, in all cases, my use of the term “women/woman authors” should always encompass these temporal, contextual understandings.

and then more broadly across society. Since all the texts in question take the conventional form of the courtship novel, the authors develop and refine their definitions of friendship between women who are on their way to marriage.3 Yet, the novels have more to do with the formation of character than the marital relationship. In fact, in spite of the given plot structure of the courtship novel, which was driven by an impending union between man and woman, the majority of these texts involve a heroine engaged in activities and conversations with everyone but the man she is meant to marry.

Katherine Green has argued that this alternate plot device represents a key shift in the broader development of the novel—the creation of the “heroine-centered courtship novel,” which transfers the focus of the novel to the development of a woman as affective individual (The Courtship Novel 5). In this context, women writers could

“forward such feminist or resistant ideals as marriage for love, egalitarian domestic relationships between men and women, and improved education for women” (Green 7).

I extend Green’s argument to encompass the female relationships and community within which the author situates her heroine. This network of relatedness further supports women’s collective desires for egalitarian marriages and improved education.

3 Katherine Green argues that the birth of the courtship novel occurred around 1740 as a result of the decline of arranged marriages and the rise of “affective individualism” (1). She approximates its plot line as beginning with “a young woman’s entrance into society, the problems arising from that situation, her courtship, and finally her choice (almost always fortunate) among suitors” (2). Green distinguishes the courtship novel from the domestic novel because it “appropriat[es] [the novel] to feminist purposes … by centering its story in the brief period of autonomy between a young woman’s coming out and her marriage” (2-3). In some ways, critical discussions of women’s novels are just as interested in what to call this genre as they are in the women writing them. What Green calls courtship novels Nancy Armstrong calls domestic fiction, in part because their respective critical foci require slight variations in terminology. Green’s definition serves my argument well, and I concur with the limitations she finds in Armstrong’s Marxist approach to the courtship novel, which “implicitly assumes the traditional masculinist, politically- invested, class conscious view of history … [and] reenacts the marginalization of the female” (18). Green argues that this problem reveals itself when we attempt to discuss the “resistances … women authors expressed through their domestic novels” (19).

Since women authors shifted their focus to scenes conducted away from the actual

“courtship,” they were able to foreground the importance of women’s friendships to their readers. Additionally, consideration of the role of women’s friendships within a community opens up “feminist or resistant” possibilities for women in society (Green).

This study explores the multiple implications of power inherent in these narratives. By revising, rewriting, and redefining the accepted parameters of women’s friendship, the writers I discuss herein sought to enact change in the lives of women and, in doing so, in the society in which they lived.

Writing between the Lines

Women writers developed a variety of strategies to achieve these “feminist or resistant” goals—some of which are more direct than others (Green). The project of revising friendship on women’s terms began in the changing realm of individual words, where the living language of speech interposes itself onto the published page and entraps the stale institutions held up by linguistic relics. Samuel Johnson referred unintentionally to these as “words that are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water” (Johnson Dictionary 1:14). Where

Johnson wished to stem the tide of these changes, women authors wished to make use of the ability to influence the “shifting” relationships between language and speech. I spend some time in Chapter 2 discussing the way Frances Burney’s novels challenge the very definition of friendship given in Johnson’s well-established and authoritative masculine model, The Dictionary of the English Language (1785).4

4 Hereafter, The Dictionary or Dictionary. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was first published in 1755. I have used the sixth edition, published in 1785, because it was most readily available

Johnson’s “Preface” to The Dictionary poses some interesting ideas about language and its vulnerabilities. For example, in his discussion of the problems of analogy, Johnson takes the time to trace the evolution of language from speech to writing, discussing along the way the development of derivatives. He rejects analogies because differences in spelling and utterances denote variances in connotation. The words are not and cannot be exactly the same in meaning. He chooses to include examples from a writer such as Milton because Milton chose to take existing words and make minor changes to them rather than creating entirely new ones. As he explains, “Of this kind are the derivatives […] from high, height, which Milton, in zeal for analogy, writes highth: Quid te exempta juvat spinis de pluribus una? to change all would be too much, and to change one is nothing” (1:8). With this example, Johnson creates an excellent metaphor for the technique women writers were using to make subtle alterations in language. Although they were not changing spellings, they took existing definitions and, like the derivatives of existing terms, expanded the meanings of words by changing their usage in the created world of their novels. As their novels both reflected and refracted living social relationships, they also revised those relationships.

In doing so, they altered the potential connotations, eventually altering the whole meaning of the words.

in full-text form and largely unaltered from its original edition. I have chosen to indicate the digital page number for in-text citations; these page numbers correspond to the online full-text sixth edition. As the work is published in two volumes, the citations will indicate the volume number, a colon, and then the digital page number. In the Works Cited section, I have indicated the URL for this full-text resource. In the event that this resource is no longer available, the entries can be found by their associated word in the usual alphabetical fashion. The only other references I make to the Dictionary can be found in the preface, which runs to 12 pages in the digital scan of the sixth edition.

Johnson is aware of the degree to which shifting connotations in language have a reciprocal relationship with the culture in which they exist. As he says, “as any custom is diffused, the words that expressed it must perish with it: as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice” (1:18).

Johnson’s tone reveals his distaste for this innovation. Culture alters language, and printed language dispersed throughout the kingdom has the power to alter the culture.

Eve Bannet has noted Johnson’s awareness of this construct of public discourse and argues that women writers such as Burney took advantage of it to relocate the power of

“politics and public life” into the private domestic sphere (Domestic Revolution 126,

127).

It is perhaps the growing permeability between the public and private spheres, and the particular ease with which books passed from one to the other and back again that left Johnson so frustrated. His “Preface” portrays a man standing by in dismay as the “corruptions of oral utterance” enter modern writing as a degradation of language that represents to him the disintegration of modern society (1:10). He implies that contemporary authors are complicit in this process by including modern speech patterns in their books, thereby perpetuating and multiplying the exposure of the populace to this bastardized language. In doing so, they encode corruption into the collective agreement of accepted definitions.

Numerous women writers in the long eighteenth century wrote into this increasingly fluid space between public and private by crafting characters and plots that would question, refute, and redefine the prevailing ideologies. Their methods may have varied, but their goals and results were similar. On the subject of friendship, they aimed

to invalidate the popular idea that women could not participate in true friendship because they lacked the necessary capacities for learning, morality, sympathy, or for the development of individual subjectivity. Neither Johnson’s omissions, nor the steady condemnation of the male reviewers, could alter the increased usage in popular culture of the expanded definition that included the affective, reasoned, and care-driven relationships being developed through women’s novels. Perhaps word-usage provides the best evidence that women novelists were making their mark, for feminine discourse exerted its influence over its masculine counterpart within the very borders masculine discourse previously claimed as its own. Women’s words then worked their way from the page into conversations taking place in the drawing rooms, and from there into public tearooms and the houses of Parliament.

In speaking of the travesty of translations, Johnson complains that by “this most mischievous and comprehensive innovation” it is impossible to avoid the introduction of the inevitable bits of the “native idiom [which] alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns” (1:18). There is perhaps no better analogy for what I see as the long term effects of women’s influence on the institutions of marriage, literature, and society through the genre of the courtship novel, for they altered both single stones and columns. By entering into the public consciousness through one of its most pervasive and culturally acceptable venues, women writers worked within a standing structure and, by translating an existing language one pebble-sized word at a time, they eventually altered the structure itself.

Austen’s sisterhood of novelists was able to do just that. In The Domestic

Revolution, Eve Bannet calls this “a paradigm of translation,” which she links to

Derrida’s “old-new paradigm of translation” (5). Bannet’s “translation” essentially describes the way women authors borrowed the language and concepts of current ideologies and then revised them to suit their own Enlightenment feminist goals. I take as a foundational premise Bannet’s argument that numerous women authors in the long eighteenth century made use of the gaps they found within Enlightenment “ideology and

… culture …to reconfigure women’s domestic and social lot” (6). This publicly

“constructed … respectable role …as moralists and reformers” allowed them to wield

“an instrument of real power” – the pen (11). There is certainly nothing threatening to society in a virtuous woman giving instruction to another woman about moral improvement. Though these authors did engage with Romantic ideologies, I focus here on the ways they located incongruities and contradictions within Enlightenment thought about women’s abilities and women’s roles in the home as mothers, daughters, and wives. Bannet does not address women’s relationships specifically, yet I find her theoretical framework very useful in my study of them since they function within traditionally accepted domestic codes. In this context, women writers found ample space for debate and reconfiguration, thereby broadening their territory by co-opting the existing terrain.

An additional part of writing into discursive gaps involves women authors’ intentional use of what Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia,” the idea that “texts contain different voices and that authors do not and cannot restrict ideologic content to one cohesive view” (Green 5). The initial layer can be seen by the novel’s diverse audience, which included the numbers of men and literary critics who will read it with an eye to condemn any woman for putting pen to paper. The tidy morals and domestic leanings of the

novels fulfill the expectations of the “proper lady” author—a figure Mary Poovey established in 1984—who writes to instruct women on how they should act so that they too can be “proper” ladies. Beneath this conventional discourse, however, these authors address the more complex position of women in an oppressive society. They speak to women’s search for individuality and suggest ways their readers might work within their narrow boundaries to use the system for their own benefit.

I use the term subversive to describe the methods employed by these authors to maintain their role as proper women while also forwarding ideas of equality and agency.

Although this term may seem a bit strong for novels that appear, on their surfaces, to be conventional, the novels do possess undercurrents that fulfill the full connotations of this word. To subvert is to “overturn (an established or existing practice, belief, rule, etc., or a set of these); to change completely (a state of things),” and more particularly to do so

“by covert action” (OED). Though stronger variations of the definition include references to toppling governments, for my purposes, I refer to the attempt by this group of women to make changes to “established” modes of thought and “practice” through their writing.

Additionally, the prefix “sub-” gives a particularly apt emphasis on the “covert” nature of their approach. Their narratives contain what I argue are sub-text and sub-layers that can be found by listening to the multiple voices addressed to their multiple audiences.

As George Haggerty has argued,

What these novelists learn to do in their different ways, then, is not openly to challenge hegemonic value in the stories they tell. Instead they find the mode of resistance to lie in the way their stories are told. … Women novelists seem to acknowledge that there is only one story to tell, but they nevertheless insist that there is more than one way to tell it. (9)

This argument applies throughout my text, but I explore this train of thought in more detail in Chapter 4, when I discuss the multi-vocal nature of the prefaces of Charlotte

Smith and Frances Burney. Both authors established unique relationships with their women readers through their prefaces in ways that encourage multi-layered readings of their texts.

Authors who created such subversive texts opened up a three-way line of communication that established women’s friendship and community. As she experienced the interior life of strong heroines along with her readers, an author developed a bond of friendship with those readers. The individual experience of reading set up a sense of intimate dialogue between reader and narrator, as well as reader and heroine. Additionally, the act of sharing the story of the life of a heroine with numerous women readers multiplied the effect of community because each individual reader subconsciously understood that she shared her experience of reading with many others.

Authors added another layer upon this interconnectivity when they discussed each other’s works within their own texts, again extending the shared experience of reading, thereby reinforcing the strength of women’s community within society.5

The heroines of the novels of this study serve as models for women readers; and each of these models can be seen as a gesture of friendship and solidarity with even the most isolated of her readers. In Burney’s first novel, the heroine Evelina must ignore the advice of her adoptive father and avoid her biological relations in order to marry the

5 One necessary qualifier to my use of the term and concept of women’s community throughout this study is that it is limited, almost entirely, to women of the middle and upper classes. That is, only women whose families could afford to educate them and to purchase the books—or a subscription to a circulating library—could have any part of this women’s community. Women of the lower classes were not part of the imagined audience of these novels, nor were they, for many years, in any way beneficiaries of even the most subtle of social changes I discuss.

man who is right for her and maintain her integrity. Similarly, the most outwardly passive of Austen’s characters, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park (1814), openly defies the decree of her wealthy uncle and, in doing so, becomes the moral compass by which all other characters are gauged at the conclusion of the novel. In each case, the isolated heroines appear docile and proper even as they achieve these ends. As I will demonstrate, such subversive tendencies highlight the importance of paying attention to the novels’ endings rather than the lip service the authors pay to the dominant masculine expectations of the period. Sharp readers locate these discursive gaps and read between the lines, where the special gestures of friendship extended by women authors to their women readers can be seen.6

Sympathy among Women

As I outline in Chapter 3, the elements of women’s friendship can be traced back to one essential quality—sympathy. Through the interactions of female friends, of both a true and false nature, the authors of the novels I discuss expand upon the ideas of companionship between equals and a feminist ethic of care. In his Treatise of Human

Nature (1759), David Hume describes the types of egalitarian relationships women writers constructed in their novels; he claims that we all have the need for “a rational and thinking being like ourselves” with whom we can share a deep level of communication of the “inmost sentiments and affections” (263). However, most writings of the period indicated that women were constitutionally incapable of forming deep,

6 See note above about my use of the term ‘woman’ in this case and the socially discursive reasons I believe this subtextual dialogue is present in the novels. While I do believe that there is a certain degree of didactic interaction with men these authors might consider ‘enlightened,’ I still argue that there is a degree of subtext meant exclusively for the women readers. In this case, the rhetorical ‘man’ in question would be defined by as a marriageable man. The role of the man in the courtship novel is one of the questions that remain open for further exploration beyond this project.

meaningful connections with one another. Nearly every debate concerning the equality between men and women led to the contested belief that women’s mental and emotional capacities were different from—and inferior to—men’s. In his Theory of Moral

Sentiments (1804), Adam Smith grants the quality of “exquisite fellow feeling” to women, yet claims that women’s sympathy does not extend to action or enable her to

“sacrifice some great and important interest” for another (223). In Mary Poovey’s estimation, Smith believes that female sympathy is unhealthy “because women do not habitually practice self-denial [and] their ‘natural receptivity’ is dangerously alive to all kinds of stimuli” (19). Smith contrasts women’s reactions with the masculine quality of self-command, which he describes as a “man who supports pain and even torture with manhood and firmness,” noting a direct contrast with the “little regard” shown “for him who sinks under them, and abandons himself to useless outcries and womanish lamentations” (287, 287-88). This “womanish” man is made so because he has “[a] fretful temper, which feels, with too much sensibility, every little cross accident”— essentially branding women as incapable of controlling their own emotions (288). In this instance, Smith’s writing is a template for the negative paradigm of women’s emotional

(in)capabilities.

Women writers opposed this representation of themselves through an alternate version of their sympathetic connections. Their novels model a sympathy inspired by the common ground of rational thought, moderation, and a mutual regard for virtuous qualities. Novel after novel rejects representations of women as emotionally driven beings, incapable of making rational decisions. The “fellow feeling” they experience results from a sense of recognition of the kind of women they are and want to be.

Recognition is a common theme in women’s novels of the period, both in the formation of friendship, and in the internal development of the heroine. A meeting between two women in Burney’s Cecilia (1782) demonstrates the kind of sympathetic connection described, one characterized by mutual recognition and admiration, with its particular emphasis on the mind: “The surprise and admiration with which Cecilia at the first glance was struck proved reciprocal: Mrs. Delvile, though prepared for youth and beauty, expected not to see a countenance so intelligent, nor manners so well formed as those of Cecilia” (155). Burney repeats that they are “mutually astonished and mutually pleased (155). This kind of relationship between women—one based on a likeness of mind, sentiment, and “fellow-feeling”—is evident in every novel in this study.

Just as it does with individual relationships, sympathy strengthens communal ties. Hume also considered sympathy to have social benefits. Hume’s Treatise of

Human Nature uses the metaphor of “strings equally wound up” or stretched between people so that “the motion of one corresponds to the rest”; these movements can “beget corresponding movements in every human creature” (418). In many of the novels of

Burney, Smith, Edgeworth, and Austen, the benefits of women’s friendships extend to the people around them. The reach of influence each woman exerts varies in accordance with her circumstances, which can be considered an additional level of social commentary.

Blurred Lines: Women’s Friendship, Romantic Friendship, and the “Lesbian Historical Project”

Studies that focus on women’s friendship in the long eighteenth century tend to fall into roughly three (often overlapping) categories: those that explore the broad concept of the “romantic” friendship, those that seek to recover lost nuances of sexual

and/or lesbian relationships between women, and those that seek to apply a variety of critical lenses to the study of women’s friendship in the Enlightenment, Romantic, or

Victorian periods. Nearly all of these works hold some useful foundational elements for my approach to this topic. However, this study addresses aspects of women’s relationships that have not been explored in any detail since Janet Todd’s work in the

1980s. The dearth of material in this last category gives this study contemporary relevance.

The first two categories contain many overlapping studies, since the field of

LGBTQIA+ studies is constantly evolving and its critics have taken a broad range of approaches to the study of both relationships and the long eighteenth century. The third category has a rather sparse collection of independent studies, most of which are either broad in scope and yet limited by their respective critical lenses, or are limited in both scope and critical approach. I attempt here to do justice to this somewhat disjointed body of work and to position myself among the various arguments it represents.

In 1980, Janet Todd took on a broad study of eighteenth century women’s relationships in Women’s Friendship in Literature. Todd identifies five categories of women’s friendship: sentimental, erotic, manipulative, political, and social. Although she claims to avoid any specific critical agenda or approach, she seems to base her categories loosely on the structures of power in each type of relationship. In the end, her study reflects the ways characters function in women’s friendships amid the many plots of eighteenth century novels by mostly male authors. 7

7 By focusing solely on plot and function Todd attempts to gather all eighteenth-century novels into five categories. She considers the “manipulative” and “social” friendship primarily based upon what the participants gain through interactions with another party. Manipulative friends twist the actions of others for personal gains while social friends simply help one another by making society more bearable.

As I study the possibility of women’s friendships in literature as potential models for egalitarian relationships, I find Todd’s most relevant definition is that of “sentimental friendships,” which exist between “equal friends [whose] love preclude[s] jealousy and condescension” (67). Herein can be found a great many of the friendships present in women’s novels; and here is the place that my study most resembles Todd’s as I seek to discover structures of equality between women. However, because Todd’s entire definition of this type of friendship develops out of a reading of Richardson’s Clarissa, she comes away with what is essentially an eighteenth-century patriarchal definition of women’s friendship, that “friendship is most supremely expressed in marriage, a condition so unequal that in it the man legitimately absorbs the woman” (67). While she acknowledges its complicity with patriarchy, Todd does not seek out women’s writings to elaborate upon her definition. Nonetheless, she attempts a convoluted argument in an attempt to make this contradictory statement stand as fact.8 This theoretical flaw continues throughout, since Todd calls upon the canon of male writers, without treating their representations of women as potentially different from those of women writers. Her

Similarly, the final category of political friendship is named simply for any woman pair that brushes against any political strain in a novel.

8 Lillian Faderman presents a rather compelling counterargument to Todd’s reading of Clarissa, explicating with great irony an extended version of the same passage Todd employed, in which Richardson writes, “Friendship, generally speaking … is too fervent a flame for female minds to manage … Marriage, which is the highest state of friendship, generally absorbs the most vehement friendships of female to female” (qtd. in Faderman 77). In this excerpt, Faderman highlights two critical components of the patriarchal narrative of women’s friendship. Richardson suggests that women do not have the mental capacity to sustain the accompanying passion, reason, and morality involved in the masculine definition of true friendship. Richardson adds that the connections between women are expected to be “absorbed”—and by implication dissolved—into marriage. Faderman reveals the relationship that Todd claimed as the prime example of “sentimental” and equal friendship for what it is—one negated by its entombment in a deprecatory patriarchal narrative.

erasure from later scholarship on friendship likely has much to do with the fact that she frames most of her definitions in this manner.

Another key drawback in Todd’s study is her virtual omission of the social phenomenon of romantic friendship. In her discussions of the categories of sentimental and erotic friendship, Todd makes a cursory mention of the possibilities critics soon addressed in full studies of romantic friendship, without actually using the term.

Subsequent theorists followed up with a body of work that involved little else, thus marking a dramatic shift in focus.

Just a year after Todd categorized women’s friendship by concentrating almost exclusively on its representation in literature, Lillian Faderman published Surpassing the

Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981), in which she recovers the term “romantic friendship”—a phrase familiar to anyone living from the Renaissance until approximately the mid-nineteenth century—for the benefit of modern readers. Her approach differs from Todd’s in several crucial ways. First, in order to capture the nature of romantic friendship, Faderman uses multiple source materials to give it historical context. Next, because romantic friendship introduces woman-to-woman relationships that inhabits a category unlike those of the present, Faderman situates it in reference to modern feminism and lesbianism while maintaining its autonomy from both. Essentially, Faderman defines romantic friendship as a precursor to modern lesbianism; through her multiple readings, she characterizes romantic friendship as a passionate but predominantly non-genital interaction between two women. Instead, she argues that romantic friendship operates as a relationship in which a woman’s strongest emotions and affections are directed toward another.

Specifically, as Faderman attempts to draw the fine lines around her subject material, she redefines the term “lesbian” to mean “a relationship in which two women’s strongest emotions and affections are directed toward each other. Sexual contact may be part of the relationship to a greater or lesser degree, or it may be entirely absent” (18).

Although several critics after Faderman challenge this definition in minor ways, (Emma

Donague’s 1993 Passions Between Women is the most thorough challenge to this claim), no one breaks from it entirely.

Eventually, an evenhanded discussion about women’s dependence upon men must also raise questions about relationships of dependence between women, including those with unequal power dynamics. Betty Rizzo’s Companions Without Vows (1994) stands apart from the many studies in this field that position themselves in terms of what can be learned about society from the perspective of various deviances from social

“norms.” Rizzo’s historical research reveals surprising inequalities within the relationships of wealthy women and their poorer companions. For example, the role of

“humble companion” to a patroness held a series of extraordinary socio-economic complications that rendered these relationships anything but equal. She then draws a direct line between women’s participation in these relationships and their roles in companionate marriages (2, 3). In spite of these inequalities, Rizzo resists the critical temptation to view same-sex relationships as symptomatic, instead considering the function of women’s companionate relationships within rather than outside of the society they inhabited. In my own argument, I consider similar possibilities as they relate to women authors. I argue that though they may present alternative or subversive models, their work need not be viewed as the product of angry, anti-social spinsters. Humor

marks the texts of the women herein. In my opening chapter, I make a very similar argument relating to women’s relationships in Frances Burney’s fiction, wherein Burney sets up female companionship as a model for egalitarian marriage. Although Burney seems unable to avoid painting pictures of the social constraints women faced, her novels were known and loved for their social satire and the witty repartee of their characters.

Such comedic interactions are, at their core, signs of the solidarity of the experiential and emotional accord among women. Rizzo terms this individual capacity and its communal influence altruism. As I do in my theorization of women’s sympathy

(Chapter 3), Rizzo finds in altruism a “regard for the interests and welfare of others, the direct opposite of aggression, which is a form of hostile encroachment on others” (20).

Rizzo develops a form of communal altruism that resembles in many ways my argument for women writers’ conscious development of sympathetic friendships as an alternative to patriarchy. As I do, Rizzo considers women’s representations of relationships as an active, conscious response to patriarchy (23).

Rizzo also explores the failures of altruism in relationships—both women’s friendships and marriages—in her analyses, making vital connections between the patterns of both. What she sees (rightly) as failure, in women’s relationships in particular, I take one step farther to read as negative capability.9 As I discuss in

9 I do not refer here to Keats’ well-known term “negative capability,” which he defines in much less concrete terms. In a letter to his brothers dated 22 December 1817, Keats says “quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Letters of John Keats 48). Women writers certainly left “uncertainties” and “mysteries” and created “doubts”; however, their hope seemed to be that their readers would exercise a combination of true emotion and reason in the service of their own happiness, which included material safety.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4, these artists paint dark portraits that posit a vision of what they believe could and should be by showing their readers dim views of what is not. By outlining the failures of women’s friendship, and its complicity with patriarchy, they sketch the parameters of the figure wished-for; through its lack, they evoke the desire for true egalitarian friendship.

In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

(2007), Sharon Marcus reflects and continues to explore Rizzo’s contention that prior formulations of women’s friendships have placed too much emphasis on defiance and difference. Instead, Marcus argues, lesbian studies of women’s friendships have limited their possibilities because they have “suggested that bonds between women mattered only to the history of women’s resistance to heterosexuality, which to date has been far less common than their participation in it” (12). Marcus’ argument supports my theory that the figure of the female friend in nineteenth century literature “is not a static or dispensable secondary character but one with a crucial role to play in achieving the marriage plot’s ends” (79). Marcus calls the role of the female friend a “narrative matrix,” which she defines as “a relationship that generates plot but is not its primary agent, subject, or object” (3, 79). The heroine finds comfort rather than conflict in her female relationships. As I argue, this makes the role of the friend that of a comforter, and a revision of former hierarchical concepts of a companion; these friendships can be self- sustaining and fulfilling as well as operate as models for a woman’s desires in her marital relationship. If the tension of the plot lies in the desire for such a union, the female friend represents a vision of its fruition.

In Chapter 2, much of my argument relies upon the way these contexts influenced women writers’ understanding of masculine language, cultural “keywords,” and, in turn, the ways they sought to alter current ideologies. In her close analysis of the language of women’s friendships, Marcus offers some useful theoretical concepts that build on Barthes’ concept of “the play of the system”—the idea that “logically fixed, closed orthodox ‘systems’ contrasted with infinitely open, destabilizing, ambiguous

‘systematics’” in order to create openings for flights from orthodoxy (27). Barthes considered these breaks “external to the system,” and thereby, utopian in nature.

Marcus reshapes Barthes’ system by suggesting that the “play” comes from within rather than outside the system—hence she situates women’s friendships inside the

Victorian gender system and considers the “play” they enact fitting into, without changing, the overall structure. She takes Barthes’ term plasticity and decides that for her purposes elasticity is more accurate, for “plasticity … refers to a pliability that allows a system or structure to acquire a new shape and be permanently changed without fracture or rupture” (27). With her term elasticity, Marcus suggests that “the Victorian gender system, however strict its constraints, provided women latitude through female friendships, giving them room to roam without radically changing the normative rules governing gender difference” (27). Essentially she sees the changes women’s friendships made being absorbed back into the system—they “played” within it without radically altering it.

I think, however, a compromise might be struck between the two when we consider the way that women writers utilized the language of the dominant systems.

While the language of women’s friendships certainly worked within the gender system—

and in my case I refer to a period prior to the Victorian period that influenced its cultural norms—the changes wrought by these writers certainly stretched and changed the actual shape of the system without breaking it entirely. Therefore, Barthes’ plasticity is a far more useful term. Looking at the long eighteenth century, women made several significant changes to the shape of the structures of marriage, courtship, and even the law—as Marcus herself attests to—through their representations of women’s friendships.10 The ability of women writers to adapt narrative to culture gave them the opportunity to alter language within their narratives; the dissemination of books in the public sphere and the influence of print on culture meant that changes in meaning had an impact in the public and private lives of the populace. In her explanation for choosing the period between 1830 and 1890 for her study, Marcus notes that “during those decades, the belief that men and women were opposite sexes, different in kind rather than degree, took hold in almost every class,” yet she also notes that “Romantics and revolutionaries challenged the very bases of marriage [and] by the 1830s, companionate marriage was the standard for measuring alliances in all classes” (6).

Perhaps the changes wrought during the period I cover—those roughly surrounding the

10 It is important to note, however, that most modern feminists do not consider any of the legal changes in England during the long eighteenth century “significant.” To summarize them briefly: the 1753 Marriage Act required all marriages to take place in a church or chapel of the Church of England; the 1836 Marriage Act gave religious nonconformists and Catholics permission to marry in their own places of worship; the 1839 Custody of Infants Act gave mothers the right to petition for custody of their children up to the age of seven; the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act transferred divorce proceedings from Parliament to a court of law. Other major changes took place throughout the latter portion of the Victorian period and into the opening of the twentieth century. In 1870 the Married Women's Property Act gave women full rights to money and property earned during her marriage. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act gave women a degree of protection in cases of domestic violence by the granting of separation orders. Finally, in 1882, the Women's Property Act gave women absolute control over their own money and property. The ramifications of each of these laws on women of various races, classes, and ages are too numerous to discuss in this space. I focus here instead on the influence of women writers of the long eighteenth century—those working prior to 1830. I do not believe their influence can be seen overtly in a review of laws and legislation.

turn of the century—account for the difference I claim here. It therefore makes sense that I end my study close to where she begins. I argue that many of the radical and fast- paced changes in the lives of women between the years she covers were made possible by some of the less obvious moves made by women in the decades before the

Victorian period. What is this if not Barthes’ plasticity?

These studies helped me define my own. Faderman’s definition positions my entry into this topic, since no full-length study exists that considers the types of women’s friendships that do not follow her essential definition or pattern. In other words, since

Janet Todd’s single study in 1980 no one has done any extensive work on what one might consider platonic women’s friendships—that is, friendships that have aims other than passionate, exclusive, or substitutive pairings. Although I can and must continue to carve out the more nuanced approaches to this subject; on a very basic level, this is where my study fits. At times I will bring in some of the theorists of romantic friendship and of what Rick Incorvati defines explicitly as the “lesbian historical project … dedicat[ed] to historical recovery work” that “links women’s friendships with lesbianism while cautiously maintaining those friendships in a distinct category” (175-76). However, the focus of this study is not the aspects of literary friendships that were exclusive or substitutive. These relationships do share many of the qualities of romantic friendships; likewise, they overlap in places with some of the topics that interest critics of lesbian history. However, I do not read the friendships in this study as precursors to a lesbian present. I read them as literary representations very much alive in their own present, and concerned with the institutions of their own time.

The Authors

The authors I have chosen for this study represent a compromise of breadth and depth of women novelists whose works approach women’s friendship in a similar manner during the long eighteenth century. I begin with Frances Burney, a prolific woman writer whose life and published works span several of the others. I discuss Jane

Austen through several chapters, and ‘end’ with her for thematic reasons, but her novels are not the last published among the women treated in this study. Charlotte Smith (1749

– 1806) published between 1784 to 1807; Frances Burney, later Frances D’Arblay,

(1752 – 1840) published her first novel in 1778 and her last in 1814; Mary

Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) first published in 1787 and worked on her last manuscript right up to her death in 1797; Maria Edgeworth (1768 – 1809) published works from

1795 to 1834; and while four of Jane Austen’s (1775 – 1817) six novels were published during her lifetime, between 1811 and 1815, the final two were published just after her death in 1818. I hope that this breadth of dates gives my readers a sense of the range and potential for a variety of interactions these authors had with the public, the publishing world, and with each another. With this selection, I attempt to establish a trend among a small set of authors who wrote across a span of roughly 34 years. I have not attempted to discuss women authors whose representations of women’s friendships differ, or whose goals seemed to me to be divergent from my chosen topic. A number of women novelists, playwrights, and poets had no desire to associate their works with women’s equality, choosing instead to use the public platform of the page to speak actively against it. Given these realities, I do not claim that all women writing in this period shared the Enlightenment feminist goals I attribute to Burney, Wollstonecraft,

Smith, Edgeworth, and Austen—only that those who did made similar inter- and intra- textual moves.

As I move among these women and their texts, I shift perspectives several times.

Most chapters take one, two, or at most three authors, as a focal point for thematic exploration of women’s friendship at various levels. However, I never wish to lose sight of the idea that these women were working with the same set of ideas, reading many of the same books, and most of all responding to the same social, political, and literary climates. I address moments when these climates varied across the twenty-plus years I treat; but overall, I consider the landscape largely level in spite of their differences in class and popularity in order to locate the similarity of purpose they shared in their representations of friendship.

In many ways, the common threads that run through Burney, Edgeworth, Smith, and Austen can be tied together in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. Considered thus,

Wollstonecraft stands at the center of the developing narrative of women’s attempts at literary, and actual, equality. Additionally, her writings embody the ideas expressed in varying ways by every author here, through her formulation of the genre, her outlining of an agenda for what women wanted in all their roles in life, and her ideas for fiction. Her ideas were not unique, but she expressed them in the most comprehensive manner.

Certainly each of these women was influenced by a number of other authors and other people in their personal lives, but a critical set of ideas can be followed, like delicate threads, running through all of these works. Whether they originate with Wollstonecraft or are merely articulated most clearly in her works, the message and mode of change for women through writing finds common ground in Wollstonecraft’s life work, which

consisted not just of the essays she is best known for, but of her novels and her extensive critical reviews. However, it is worth noting that such a view gives preference to modern articulations of feminist goals, including the more strident tone and the sense of anger she expressed at the injustices against women. Her reactions, in essence, are more comprehensible to us as modern readers than some of the other women of the time. The echoes of her words found in Smith, Edgeworth, Burney, and Austen deserve to be considered contextually rather than anachronistically, and this study approaches them as such.

At the other end of the spectrum, many consider Burney as the one-dimensional

“mother” of the novel, safely ensconced in the eighteenth century. We sometimes forget that she outlived many of the early authors she inspired. She is both British and continental, as her preface to The Wanderer (1814), entitled “To Dr. Burney, F.R.S. and

Correspondent to the Institute of France” reminds us. Edgeworth and Smith likewise defy categorization. I focus primarily on Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, yet Edgeworth was a prolific author who published from roughly 1795 to 1834 and in multiple genres.

Likewise, I touch on very few of Charlotte Smith’s extensive works in both prose and poetry. Both of these authors share Burney’s and Wollstonecraft’s drive to contribute to the changing form of the novel; and their bodies of work reveal an underlying effort to raise the stature of women as literary figures.

The most persistent critical temptation for anyone who chooses to include Austen in a study of several women of the long eighteenth century is to place her at the metaphorical end, and to view her works as the ‘perfecting’ of earlier, half-realized styles or ideas. I choose, however, to believe Austen’s numerous statements about the

great influence of every author in this study. Austen read and admired Smith,

Edgeworth, and Burney and attested openly to the debt she felt she owed them.

Considering Austen as the penultimate conclusion of a literary era tends to imply that her writing is somehow the culmination of undeveloped, lesser authors, which in turn does a disservice to the unique talents of every author in question. Even our studies in

Austen are diminished by such a view, since resituating her among her sister authors allows us to see her engaged in an ongoing dialogue about reason, emotion, virtue, and power. Table 1.1, which compares dates of birth, death, and various publications,11 emphasizes the ways that the texts and ideas of each of the novelists in this study did more than simply influence Austen. They interact with her, they parallel her, and they both precede her and carry on after her death. Her novels do not conclude an era, nor do they merely perfect the techniques of the women writers whose fiction both influenced and remained contemporary to hers. I wish to show Austen as a member of a community rather than an anomaly in an otherwise arid fictional landscape.

Instead, I show Austen as she presents herself in her own texts—as a friend to her readers and a sister to other authors. As a friend to her readers, she sometimes speaks with the voice of a mentor, and sometimes as a fellow traveler along the path to individuation and agency. As a sister novelist, Austen saw herself in the manner she presents in Northanger Abbey—as one of many women writers engaged in a collective, ongoing enterprise, joined in an antagonistic debate with those whose criticisms in the press were daily “bestowing the harshest epithets” on their works (30). No one woman writer stands at the center of these goals; I believe they shared them, and developed

11 This Table can be found at the end of this Chapter.

them over the years in a progressive fashion, forming as they did so a communal “body” of women.

Chapter Summaries

In Chapter 2, “The Language of Female Friendship – Companionship and

‘Schemes of Happiness,’” I explore the masculine definitions of friendship that were in circulation in the long eighteenth century by way of examining Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Within this context, I examine Frances Burney’s journey to authorship, Johnson’s role in that process, and Burney’s methods of coopting masculine language for her own purposes.

In women’s definitions of friendship, actions and emotional connections trump the narrow definition of the ready-made set of family-friends or friends who merely served as beneficial allies. Burney and numerous women writers after her responded to masculine definitions of friendship by foregrounding sympathetic bonds, and the positive, virtuous, improving influences they had on all who experienced them. As one of the most highly respected and influential women novelists of the long eighteenth century, Burney presented possibilities to other women writers via the courtship novel.

In this chapter, I make use of Cecilia to argue that Burney writes to multiple audiences, catering to conventional expectations on the surface while interweaving numerous layers of meaning that speak to her women readers. She does so through the complex friendships between women and their role in Cecilia’s journey through the novel.

In Chapter 3, “Love and Friendship in Jane Austen’s Communities of Women,” I delve deeper into the key element of women’s revised definition of friendship—that of active sympathy. I work through Austen’s development of this definition throughout her novels, as I think this progression allows for a thorough and nuanced re-definition. That

is, as Austen moves through her career as an author, her interaction with fellow authors makes her a good study in the contrasts of masculine constructions of friendship and feminine ones. The most important distinctions I make can be found in the division of power and dominance. Masculine definitions find their alternative in women’s novels in egalitarian, non-hierarchical relationships. The term “egalitarian” can be somewhat misleading since it does not always apply to equality in class relations, particularly in

Austen. Rather, the novels define true women’s friendship through equality of mind and genuine feeling. The quality of feeling is then refined further to a detailed definition of sympathy, which the authors present consistently as the most important component of friendship. A woman’s ability to participate in sympathetic friendship marks her as a morally superior being; conversely, many of the novels denote the fullness of individuation by the achievement of sympathetic ability, as outlined in women’s terms.

In Chapter 4, “‘Protection and Regard’: Paratexts and the Creation of Women’s

Literary Community,” I discuss the way women writers such as Burney and Smith took advantage of the apparatus of the printed text to circumvent some of the established boundaries of the novel. From the ambiguous entry and exit points of a text, to the intersections created by allusions to other works, women continued to find ways to create openings that broadened the reach and scope of their texts. Their collective prefatory materials provide an example of Gerard Genette’s concept of the paratext as

“a zone without any hard and fast boundary” as well as the power of allusion harnessed by Austen, Edgeworth, and many others (2). These porous ‘vestibules’ created pathways to dual, parallel, and counter-narratives, which allowed women writers to begin a discussion with sympathetic readers about issues of import to women (Genette

2). After Wollstonecraft’s death, and the scandal that followed it, the use of these apparatuses became necessarily more complex.

Chapter 5, “(Re)Creating the Novel: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reviews, Maria

Edgeworth’s Loose Ends, and Frances Burney’s Legacy,” serves as a follow-up to

Chapter 3 in the sense that it picks up with the life of Mary Wollstonecraft and considers the way these apparatuses and methods changed and became even more complex and subverted. I begin with a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft as a reviewer of women’s novels, focusing for a time on her interactions and changing views of Charlotte Smith, and then considering the influence her role as a reviewer had on her role as a novelist.

Studying the ways women authors related to other women authors in the public presses gives a unique insight into broader social discussions about literature and authorship alongside the responses women had to these discussions. After Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, authors such as Edgeworth had to deal even more subversively in a changing political climate. Here I take a second look at Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), considering its temporal framework as well as her use of paratexts to show her engagement with fellow women authors. I end by reexamining Burney’s end-of-life paratexts, which serve as both refection into the former decade and the legacy of the long eighteenth century— that of changes during her lifetime in women’s potential to speak publicly, to move in society, and to respond to masculine discourse with authority.

I end with a brief Coda that reevaluates Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ in

Northanger Abbey as a document revised by Austen near the end of her life rather than one of her earliest works. The relevance of this argument lies in the weight we can place on the ‘Defense’s’ engagement with other women writers and readers. Did Austen

speak more as a writer or a reader? The dynamic message of the ‘Defense,’ with its multi-leveled, communal commentary on the interrelatedness of writers and readers seems to me to make the timing of this text—or its revision—matter. For my part, reading the ‘Defense’ as a reflection of her years of engagement with fellow writers, as well as a developing sense of the need for solidarity between readers and writers, makes this momentary outburst a particularly apt place to conclude.

An Invitation

Martin Buber’s conception of relational ethics can be an instructive way of thinking about the way eighteenth-century women authors employed friendship in their novels in order to engage in a deeper feminist dialogue, which I trace through their texts. In Martin Buber and Feminist Ethics, James Walters argues that Buber’s

“insightful critique of modern philosophical ethics … became productive soil for another nontraditional philosophical ethic: feminism’s care ethic,” which can be defined at its core as an ethics based on “concrete relational experience, ... [c]oncern for intersubjective experience,” and “the fundamental conviction that human life is essentially interdependent” (vii, 68, 77). Walters finds common ground in feminism’s and Buber’s post-modern rejection of “the Enlightenment’s enthronement of reason and its accompanying objectification of life [which] results in rejection of set ethical norms”

(Walters xi). The women writers of the long eighteenth century had more immediate experience with Enlightenment thinkers and therefore engaged more directly with their ideas. To label any eighteenth century women writers—however progressive their writing may be—as “post-modern” is obviously anachronistic, most importantly because they did not reject Enlightenment concepts so much as engage them. Instead, women

writers demonstrated agreement with Enlightenment ideologies in some places, challenged them in others, and revised them throughout their novels.

However, if we entertain the idea that Austen and the women who wrote before, during, and after her undertook what we might be called a post-modernist project—that she placed the claims of science and logic “on par with the descriptions offered by poets, novelists” and other non-traditional sources—we can reevaluate her novels, and those of her sister authors (Walters 86). For instance, rather than overtly rejecting “set ethical norms,” she and some of her sister authors rewrote them. I contend that we should view her “Defense of the Novel” in this light. Austen’s battle for authorial agency,

I believe, lies at the core of the attack on what she called the “other literary corporation(s)” of her time; those who continued to reinforce the language and unchallenged authority of “the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and

Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne” (31). Austen lays the material groundwork here for refuting the superior claims of the infallibility or objective claims of reason. In her ‘Defense,’ I believe Austen was already making the same basic argument that feminist critic Alison Jaggar makes when she explains that even reason

“cannot be justified independently of social agreements” (qtd. in Walters 87). Likewise,

Austen’s cry for women’s engagement in literary productions and with each other in the literary marketplace matches feminist philosopher Margaret Walker’s proposed alternative moral epistemology, which requires “attention to the particular … construct[ion of] morally relevant understandings which are ‘contextual and narrative,’ and … deliberation as a site of expression and communication” (88). Eighteenth century

women’s novels operated precisely in this way. That they were narrative in form goes without saying. However, on a deeper level, they conveyed morality through

“deliberation” and “communication” by creating characters that were relatable to readers. They developed a dynamic system of interrelatedness among the lives of fictional characters and the lives of readers—one that found further expression in women writers’ public discourse. As such, narratives told by women whose lives were lived in “narrow and contextual” situations connected with their women readers on a personal level, since they mirrored like circumstances. This narrative style resulted in

“communication” between reader and writer, and among the broader reading community.

The section of Northanger Abbey that serves as the epigram to this chapter, to which I will often refer as Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel,’ inspired this project. Its phrases echo through the following pages, particularly its notions of interconnectedness through “protection and regard.” In subsequent chapters, I address the multiple dimensions of relatedness that Austen brings into focus—author, reader, community— treating them as subject positions with the potential for strength, exploration, and agency just as the authors herein have done. I examine the ways each author defined herself as a writer and a reader through the friendships of women in her texts. I discuss how the authors viewed their relationships with one another and with their readers.

Finally, I question how they saw their texts in dialogue with other texts.

Although I speak here of Austen, I want this project to reflect the sentiments of the ‘Defense.’ Just as Austen viewed her relationships with other authors as companionate and non-hierarchical, I consider the project outlined above as one shared

on some level by every author discussed herein. I begin where they had to begin—with a masculine discourse that defined women writers in reference to itself. I move in the direction that they moved, in and through and under and around language, speaking with multiple voices to enter the discourse of the day. I listen to what they say about women’s friendship in order to learn their methods of moving in a world that set itself against them as individuals and as a community. In honor of a few women in whose works “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed,” I invite you to join the conversation.

Table 1-1. Table of comparative dates of births, publications, and deaths (1740 – 1850) Year Birth (b.), Death, or Publication

1749 Charlotte Smith* b. 4 May

1752 Frances Burney b. 13 June

1759 Mary Wollstonecraft b. 27 April

1768 Maria Edgeworth* b. 1 January

1775 Jane Austen b. 16 December

1778 Burney. Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

1782 Burney. Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress

1784 Smith. Elegaic Sonnets and Other Essays

1787 Wollstonecraft. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.

1788 Smith. Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle

1788 Wollstonecraft. First reviews published in the Analytical Review

Wollstonecraft. Mary, a Fiction.

1790 Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Men

1792 Smith. Desmond, a Novel

Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Table 1-1 Continued Year Birth (b.), Death, or Publication 1795 Smith. Montalbert, a Novel.

Edgeworth. Letters for Literary Ladies

1796 Burney. Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth.

Wollstonecraft. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

1797 Wollstonecraft’s death, 10 September

1798 Wollstonecraft. Wrongs of Women (unfinished manuscript) published posthumously

[**William Godwin publishes Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman]

1799 Smith. The Young Philosopher, a Novel.

1800 Edgeworth. Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian tale

1801 Edgeworth. Belinda

1806 Smith’s death, 28 October

1809 Edgeworth. Tales of Fashionable Life 6 vols (1809-12)

1811 Austen. Sense and Sensibility

1813 Austen. Pride and Prejudice

1814 Burney. The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties

Table 1-1 Continued Year Birth (b.), Death, or Publication 1814 Edgeworth. Harrington, a Tale

Austen. Mansfield Park

1816 Austen. Emma

1817 Austen’s death, 18 July

1818 Austen. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published together posthumously

1834 Edgeworth. Orlandino; Helen, a Novel

1840 Burney’s death, 6 January

1849 Edgeworth’s death, 22 May

* Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth were prolific writers who published many more works during their careers than I have included in this list. I have mentioned their first and final publications as well as emphasized places where their works overlap with the other authors in this study. Their works are far too numerous to include here. All six of Jane Austen’s published novels are included in this list; however, I have not accounted for her unpublished works since these do not interact with anyone outside of her immediate family circles during her lifetime. I have included all of Frances Burney’s novels. However, her Journals and Letters were not made available to the public until long after her death. **All of Mary Wollstonecraft’s published writings appear above. Her posthumous Memoirs, which were published by her husband William Godwin, are included in brackets. Although she composed some of the Memoir’s contents, Godwin composed much of the text. Nonetheless, the publication of these Memoirs in 1798 had an enormous influence on the community of women writers. I discuss this at length in Chapters 4 and 5.

CHAPTER 2 THE LANGUAGE OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP—COMPANIONSHIP AND “SCHEMES OF HAPPINESS”

Should I examine you in the dead languages, would not your living accents charm from me all power of reproof?

—Frances Burney Cecilia

If women writers wanted to influence current ideological discussions of import, they had first to understand the traditional, implicitly masculine definitions of cultural

“keywords” to which their own alternative formulations might speak. In other words, they had to speak the language before they could hope to influence it; particularly when their key strategy was to alter it from the inside out. As active producers of culture, these authors had an acute awareness of the types of words that affected women’s lives.

Words like “woman,” “companion,” and “friend” related to and interacted with institutions like marriage, family, estate, and inheritance upon deeply ideological grounds. Situated in this way, changes in one invariably altered the other. These kinds of institutional changes may seem more obvious when the altered “definition” is a legal one, like the

1882 Marriage Act that cemented women’s claims to personal property.1 However, a number of less obvious conceptual changes prior to these laws led public discussion on a winding and varied path toward visible and legally enforceable changes. I discuss here a part of that path—the function of the changing definition of female friendship as it relates to both women’s individual identities and to women’s desires for change in the

1 See my more extensive footnote above on the various legislative changes that influenced women’s rights throughout the nineteenth century.

social institutions of marriage and inheritance. I then examine Frances Burney’s engagement with these changes and the way they reveal her active participation in the revisionary efforts of women writers in the courtship genre.

Formal Definitions of Friendship

Evolving and contradictory ideas about relationships were no doubt circulating in the eighteenth century much as they are now; but a review of some of the widely read authors and philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows common threads within the dominant masculine discourse. At its core, the question at hand involves the various interpretations of the basis for friendship. Of what is friendship made? What substance forms and cements the bonds of friendship? An inquiry into the origins of friendship leads back to issues of character; in the long eighteenth century this debate included birth status, predisposition, education, and the potential for the improvement of the mind and spirit.

Given its wide usage in various genres and contexts, an exact definition of the term friendship as it was understood in the long eighteenth century is hard to come by.

Contemporary historian Randolph Trumbach’s extensive studies on both friendship and kinship led him to claim that although the two terms might be used in different contexts, they “were not, however, easily distinguished in the eighteenth century … [friend] could mean one’s close or distant relation, a patron or a client, an individual to whom one was tied by mutual sponsorship, or someone attached by warm affection” (64). Such broad connotations highlight the key areas of shifting meaning in the period. At a time when the distinction between friend-as-close-relation and non-familial friend began to blur, women authors took advantage of this trend to redefine female friendships by shifting away from the social benefits of friendship to an emphasis on affectionate and

sympathetic bonds. They asserted that character trumped blood relations when it came to matters of the heart.

A look at Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language which,2 by the publication of its sixth edition in 1785, had established its reputation as the primary authority for definitions, shows that Johnson held either a temporal or gendered bias when it came to explaining fully what the term friendship meant. Johnson relies on authors of the past to support his definitions and all of his examples are from male authors. The former constraint necessitates the latter, thereby creating an omission of contemporary women authors. Regardless of his intentions, Johnson’s definition represents a traditional masculine construction of friendship

In the entry for the term, the first and theoretically most widely accepted usage says simply: “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy; opposed to foe or enemy” (1:836). However, even in this first entry, an odd disconnect appears; for this friend is “one joined to another,” yet indistinct, unnumbered subjects are “opposed to [a] foe or enemy” (emphasis mine 1:836). Does this mean that the two joined in the first part of the definition are equally joined in their opposition to an enemy, or that a friend can also be one who opposes an enemy? This latter usage is indicative of friendships forged in times of war, when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—a tenuous basis for a relationship, since the same friend may be in all other respects an enemy.3 Only in the fourth entry does the most frequently used association given in women’s novels appear,

2 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Johnson’s Dictionary, including citations from the “Preface” are from the 1785 edition.

3 Johnson’s second and third entries suggest a relationship that also depends upon contentious situations—the second entry calls a friend “one without hostile intentions” and the third “one reconciled to another” (1:836).

that of the reference of a friend as “an attendant or companion” (1:836). However, this definition should be taken quite literally; when used in this way, the friend in question is merely someone accompanying another in any number of activities; it carries none of affective dimension we tend to give the word today.

In the fifth and sixth entries we find somewhat mixed descriptions, for to define a friend as a “favourer; one propitious,”4 may suggest that this relationship involves emotion and even affection, yet many of the underlying sources of both “favourer” and

“propitious” involve the exchange or granting of favors (1:836, 2:380). In this case, the friendship is predicated upon an emotion specified in another entry as kindness, but one that also contains an inherent inequality—the dependence of one party upon the other for both “favour” and favors. In the final definition, Johnson says the word friend may be used as “a familiar compellation” (1:836).5 To be familiar meant to have anything from a

“domestick” relation to being someone “long acquainted”; it denoted being “habituated by custom” with another (1:836). Therefore, to be addressed as a friend may simply mean that a mutual recognition exists as a result of extended acquaintance by virtue of either blood relation or social obligation. In spite of Johnson’s claims, it can be universally acknowledged that neither extended acquaintance nor blood relationships always give rise to affection. In fact, much of the humor of women’s novels depends on

4Johnson’s entry for ‘Propi'tious’ simply says, “Favourable; kind,” but his multiple examples set up a clear pattern of the needs of one party being met by the generosity of the other; the ensuing power dynamic is not the same as that of that set up by women writers of sympathetic, egalitarian friendship (2:380). After all, asking for and receiving favors may involve feeling, but this exchange is based in self-interest on both sides; it is not a relationship based on equality. In the first three examples, the petitioners are men asking God for favor; the fourth is a man asking his friend to help him convince his sister to marry him. He draws from the writings of Spencer, Milton, Dryden and Addison respectively (2:380).

5 Johnson’s definition for ‘Compellation’ is “The style of address; the word of salutation.” His examples suggest that there is an appropriate style of salutation depending upon the person being addressed, or as he says, “The style best befitted” to the recipient (1:431).

upending this very assumption. Other than Johnson’s first entry, where the positive feelings of benevolence and intimacy develop as a result of close proximity, the overall definition seems remarkably void of emotion.

How can Johnson help us read representations of friendship in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women’s novels? Johnson’s curious omission of affect raises questions about the gendered implications of the term in the literary world. Johnson once said in his private life that “[e]very man who comes into the world has need of friends. If he has to get them for himself, half his life is spent before his merit is known.

Relations are a man’s ready friends who support him. When a man is in real distress, he flies into the arms of his relations” (Quotes 45). On its surface, this sounds like another way of saying that friends are simply one’s relations. But Johnson’s use of the word

‘distress’ suggests that a man’s emotional, social, and monetary needs can be met by non-familial friends. Additionally, the friends one has “to get” must discover one’s

“merit,” or personal worth as part of the formation of that bond. This addition lends credence to the idea that at least one of the possible foundations for friendship outside the family can be the mutual esteem of another’s character. As we will see, many authors of the period, most of them women, took the word “companion” and developed a complex relationship based upon this changing definition of friendship that eventually began to apply to courtship and marriage. No doubt the idea of “companionate” marriage originated in the combination of these words and their changing connotations.

Johnson’s dictionary, it seems, represents a grand effort to impose his will upon the shifting language of his day by resituating it in the past, a past that is conspicuously lacking women’s voices in any significant degree. The alterations of language that

Johnson observes make visible the symbol of male authorship—the pen—and catch many hands in the act of coopting that powerful emblem for themselves.

Dr. Johnson and Frances Burney

This great sleight-of-hand constitutes the triumph of women authors. As a primary example, Frances Burney began as a young, shy, seemingly naïve author whose first novel met with such enormous success that she was catapulted to fame within the span of a year. One of Burney’s greatest strengths was her connection with her audience. Her ability to create such a bond seemed to come naturally. However, she began to discover its potential for power through her relationship with Samuel

Johnson.

Considering Johnson’s statements about authors in the “Preface” of his

Dictionary, it may seem ironic that he was one of Frances Burney’s biggest fans. In fact, his appreciation of her skill and her works seems to almost contradict the harsh and anxious statements in his “Preface.” Johnson loved Evelina and spoke highly of it to their mutual friends. His opinion of her only improved through subsequent publications.

Dr. Johnson’s approbation of Burney’s writing likewise contributed to her growing popularity as an author and to the continued sales of her books.6

Johnson also took a personal liking to Burney and was a friend of her family and intimate social circle. He called her his “dear Fanny,” and to her he was always “dear

Dr. Johnson.” Here perhaps is where Johnson’s public and private definitions of friend reappear and find their echo in the “Preface,” for he makes a single exception to his

6 Cecilia’s record sales came, in no small part, from the popularity of her first novel, Evelina. Dr. Johnson’s known approval of Burney’s novels is thought to have contributed to the continuing sales of subsequent editions of both novels.

sharp parameters for the time constraints he places on his Dictionary in order to maintain purity in language—a select few of his friends. It seems his friendships introduced contradictions into his theories of literature and language; for he admits, after saying that he doesn’t “wish to be misled by partiality” to being led to include certain people by his “heart, in the tenderness of friendship” (1:14).

Johnson’s blindness to this contradiction can be seen in both his text and in his relationship with Burney, for his discussions with her about the changeability of language also contradict the statements he made in this “Preface,” and his encouragement of her writings certainly seem to go against, at least in part, his desire to maintain the forms and language of antiquity. Perhaps his delight in his “dear Fanny” softened his heart and gave him reason to make an exception for her in his otherwise traditional, masculine formulations of language.

From Burney’s perspective, Johnson contributed to her as a developing author by being one of her first professional readers. His warm and consistent praise of her work provided a great deal of affirmation of her talent and, as is evidenced in at least one letter during the composition of Cecilia, provided a powerful counterpoint to the voices of the two overbearing men in her life who interfered substantially in her career.7

For a young, uncertain author, hearing that the great Dr. Johnson “was much pleased with [her] book,” talked about the characters in it extensively, and said they “were never better drawn” gave her the courage to continue pursuing a public writing career in spite of her fears and doubts (Journals 90).

7 Burney’s father and a friend of the family, nicknamed her “Daddy” Mr. Crisp, ruled her literary life closely until her marriage.

Burney was fascinated with Johnson’s command of language, particularly the way he used and created language. One journal entry records an exciting evening for

Burney, during which she heard Johnson praise Evelina in person for the first time at

Mrs. Thrale’s dinner table. The entry contextualizes Burney’s growing sense of place in the world through both relationships. Her friendship with Mrs. Thrale was as valuable to her as Dr. Johnson’s.

This journal entry, read in its entirety, shifts back and forth between the delightful anecdotes of Dr. Johnson’s conversation and Burney’s interactions with Mrs. Thrale.

After Johnson pays her the high compliment of referring to her characters as real people, which indicates his approval of her novel as one that is true to life, Burney shifts her focus to her time with Mrs. Thrale. Prior to this, Burney has given numerous samples of Mrs. Thrale’s sparkling wit and intellect in the company of others, but in this setting, the women appear as intimate companions. Mrs. Thrale invites Burney to join her on a trip, and Burney admits to being overjoyed by Mrs. Thrale’s manner of insistence, because it shows how much she truly cares for her. Mrs. Thrale asks Burney along for the sole purpose of enjoying her company (95, 96). Watching Mrs. Thrale challenge and meet Johnson on equal terms, yet doing so with kindness, must have impressed Burney with its ingenuity. Nevertheless, Dr. Johnson’s praise of her writing settled deeply into Burney’s sense of herself as an author, as can be seen in her reflections on the evening. First she admires Johnson for making up a word as a joke and then decides that perhaps she can do the same.

How delighted was I to hear this master of Languages so unaffectedly and sociably and good naturedly make Words, for the promotion of sport and good humor … After Dinner, when Mrs. Thrale and I left the Gentlemen, we had a Conversation that to me, could not but be delightful, as she was

all good humour, spirits, sense, and agreeability, … Surely I may make words, when at a loss, if Dr. Johnson does” (emphasis in original 95).

This conversation and boost of confidence took place in 1778, soon after the publication of Evelina. It captures perfectly the ways Burney learned from Johnson and yet took what she learned in her own direction, for her created word applies to character and friendship rather than to things.

Burney’s confidence in herself as an author came under fire only a year later.

Encouraged by the success of Evelina and the implied agreement of Richard Sheridan to produce any play she wrote “unsight, unseen,” Burney composed a comedy entitled

The Witlings (Doody 72). She recorded in her journal a conversation around this time when Johnson seemed to dare her to challenge the highly regarded Lady Montague to a kind of battle of the wits:

‘Down with her, Burney!—down with her!—spare her not! Attack her, fight her, and down with her at once!—You are a rising Wit, --she is at the top, - -and when I was beginning in the World, and was nothing to nobody, the Joy of my life was to fire at the established Wits!’ (Journals and Letters 101)

How could she resist such confidence in her abilities? Her play, The Witlings, was the result of the encouragement she received from Dr. Johnson and Mr. Sheridan, as well as her own desire to try her hand at a genre that was taken more seriously than the novel. However, Mr. Crisp and her father decided to suppress it in 1779, perhaps not coincidentally because they feared it would be insulting to “Bluestockings,” including

Mrs. Montague.8 Burney was understandably devastated by this; after a year of hard work, her father forbid production weeks before it was to commence (Doody 93).9

Instead, Burney got to work on Cecilia, a dark, nearly tragic courtship novel.

When, in 1782 Mr. Crisp asked Burney to change one of the critical scenes in Cecilia, she wrote an intriguing letter to him that shows both her deep regard for him and her abiding anger at having her artistic independence taken away in the past. In this case, however, her resolve comes before her flattery, for she tells him first that “[t]he conflicting scene … to which you so warmly object, is the very scene for which I wrote the whole Book! and so entirely does my plan hang upon it, that I must abide by its reception in the World, or put the whole behind the Fire!” (Journals and Letters 178).

Although she evokes Johnson earlier in this letter, it is not to say that he has read this scene, but to say that he would support her in her own decision to keep it. This suggests that the book was written as much for a female audience as a male one, for

Burney tells Crisp that only one other person has read it—a woman—and that reader loved it. Dr. Johnson, Burney tells him, would approve of trusting “the natural feelings of untaught hearers,” like this woman, and so does she (179). In the context of her previous experience with the play, her role as a woman, and the role of women’s

8 I discuss the suppression of this play in greater detail in Chapter 4. Several critics have speculated that the “dark” quality of Cecilia can be attributed to Burney’s reaction to being manipulated by these controlling men. For further details, see Chapter 3 of Margaret Anne Doody’s Frances Burney: The Life in the Works.

9 In Laughing Feminism, Audrey Bilger notes that when Mr. Sheridan suggests that Burney write a comedy for the stage, Sir Joshua Reynolds encourages Burney further by telling her she has “already had all the applause and fame [she] can have given [her] in the closet” (qtd. in Bilger 26). Burney describes her own response: “I actually shook from head to foot. I felt myself already in Drury Lane, amidst the hubbub” (26). In spite of these reservations, all evidence shows that she overcame these fears for she composed a polished finished draft of The Witlings and was prepared for the production up to the day her father and Mr. Crisp put a stop to the production.

opinions about matters of import in the eighteenth century, her statements sound a bit saucy. As she moves on to give a defense of her reasons for portraying Mrs. Delvile in the objectionable scene, her tone is more self-assured than defensive:

I meant in Mrs. Delvile to draw a great, but not a perfect character: I meant, on the contrary, to blend upon paper, as I have frequently seen blended in life, noble and rare qualities, with striking and incurable defects. I meant, also, to shew how the greatest virtues and excellencies, may be totally obscured by the indulgence of violent passions, and the ascendancy of favourite prejudices. (178)

In this letter, Burney seems determined to take back her power of making words, creating female characters for her own purposes, and making the statements that she wants to make about names, emotions, and the place of each in a woman’s life. She reaches back to Johnson’s encouragement to remind her of her power as an author, but she claims it as her own. In fact, by threatening the man who took her last work away with the destruction of the present one, Burney shows that she has realized the power those pages possess.

Frances Burney may well be one of the first widely published women to make this kind of bold move in the eighteenth century. No doubt other women attempted to make such arguments, in both subtle and radical ways, but Burney’s overwhelming success as a novelist put her novels into more hands, making her arguably more influential. In 1783, she recorded a comment made by a woman reader about Cecilia:

“No book,” says her reader, “ever was so useful as this because none other that is so good, was ever so much read” (202). And it was read by all with Burney’s essential scene intact.

Johnson voiced his approval of some of Cecilia’s comic characters. In her

Journals, however, Burney spent more time noting the reactions of several women

readers, one of whom claimed that as she and her friend read the book, they “cried – but then … had so much Laughter to make us amends! – we were never left to sink under our concern” (200). The other, however, had a more complex reaction: “When I first read it, I did not cry at all; I was in an agitation that half killed me, – that shook all my Nerves, and made me unable to sleep at Nights from the suspence I was in … the second Time, however, when I knew the sum total, I cried at the distress ready to break my heart” (201). Again, Burney seems equally concerned with the way women react to her novel and, in particular, the way they “read” the emotional lessons of the book.

She notes that people are talking about Mrs. Delvile, the question of names and fortunes and inheritance, and of the kind of characters like Mr. Delvile to be found in the world. As one reader says of Mr. Delvile: “Why I personally know three myself! And one is so very like, talks so exactly in the same manner of his occupations, his family, his estates, and his importance, that I always have him present to me when I read old

Delvile’s speeches” (201-2). Not only does she strike the chord of “Natural” characterization she wished to achieve, but her readers’ responses show that these characters have hit their thematic mark. These reflections show an author deeply invested in the reception of her audience—not just in whether or not they like the book, but in how they responded to it emotionally, and how they were affected by its message.

Burney’s ability to elicit such responses demonstrates her mastery of the construction of fictional spaces with which her audience can relate, even if their actual life circumstances are different. Her novels place greater emphasis on women’s experience, women’s point of view, and things that matter to women. As Austen later recognized, Burney was the first of many women authors to befriend her women

readers through the mastery of narrative voice and through the interiority of her heroine.

Through her heroine, and through her own authorial dexterity, Burney shows her women readers the dangers of the world and some methods of avoiding them. In the

“real life” world of her journals, women move between private female spaces and public life. Their private conversations strike a balance between affect, character, and life events while their public lives are made up of dress, appearances, and conversations governed by context. Their language becomes subject to space and place. Likewise, the novels examine the ways that language can be coopted, altered, manipulated, and recreated in order to help women navigate their world.

The Language of Character

To introduce Cecilia Beverley to her readers, Burney chose to describe to them her place—in every sense of the word—in eighteenth century British society. Cecilia’s place includes the details of her physical location, her lineage, the relative wealth and status of her family, and the current state of her financial affairs. This combination of factors amounts to Cecilia’s “situation” in the world—the structures to which her life, person, and freedom are subject.10 Although these structures account for the complex concept of “place” for both men and women, women readers understood the secondary layer of meaning that Burney included in the disabling mechanism of Cecilia’s uncle’s will.

10 Austen’s novels follow this trend of blending character description with a heroine’s situation in life at the outset; Northanger Abbey varies slightly, though I argue that Austen’s “situation” of Catherine simply adds to her play with the genre of the courtship novel. In other words, Austen places Catherine within this tradition as a “heroine” through her introduction: “No one who saw Catherine Moreland in her infancy would have supposed her to be born to be an heroine,” while also following Burney’s more practical method of placing her heroine socially and financially (5).

In the eyes of society, Cecilia’s status and identity originate in the conditions of this will—a document written by a male pen that represents a male voice. This pen, the voice, and the “will” of the man behind it are the source of most of her difficulties. Cecilia is “heiress to an estate of 3000 pounds per annum; with no other restriction than that of annexing her name, if she married, to the disposal of her hand and her riches” (5-6). To the world, she is an Heiress, a status that, by all appearances makes her situation most desirable; to the world, she is blessed, and “largely indebted to fortune” (6). In reality, however, the restrictions of this document render her dependent on the whims of her guardians; for she has no use of the money before she is of age and she is bound by propriety to live with one of her guardians until that time. Cecilia’s circumstances illustrate the disconnect between women and their access to money. In the eighteenth century, however large their literal fortunes may be, women’s figurative fortunes and future lives depended entirely upon the will of fathers, brothers, guardians, and the men they married. By virtue of this divide, the novel must have had a unique meaning to its female audience, who could identify in key ways with a heroine who found herself in danger by virtue of being a woman—in spite of her large fortune.

With this secondary reading in mind, Burney’s shift in focus from patriarchal power to character gains significance. Early in the novel, and after establishing Cecilia’s situation as a backdrop, Burney turns away from the structures to which her heroine is subject. She reframes the value system within the novel to one based on character rather than class, possessions, and capital. Burney says Cecilia is “indebted to … nature,” which she considers a “yet greater obligation” than that which she owes “to fortune” (6). Burney’s concise description of her heroine encapsulates, on numerous

levels, the degree of intelligence, honesty, and transparency Burney sets up as ideal throughout the novel. From the outset, Cecilia exemplifies a balanced individual who is guided equally by “understanding” and “sensibility,” which is Burney’s unremitting message to women throughout the novel.

Burney’s mode of character description—and the relative values placed on various qualities—levels the playing field in terms of gender. Where land, fortunes and names may be taken away based on gender, a person’s character cannot. Likewise, men and women can be judged equally when it comes to character. Certainly the vise- like limitations and double standards surrounding women were still influenced by outer impressions of character, but Burney seeks to emphasize interiority in order to work toward equality. In doing so, she exposes the overwhelming limitations of being a woman.

Nonetheless, the set of values Burney establishes in Cecilia—compassion, charity, sympathy, intelligence, authenticity—are within the reach of her women readers.

As she constructs Cecilia’s character, she highlights the ways Cecilia’s best qualities determine her ability to participate in satisfying relationships. She also contrasts these with plenty of negative examples through a cast of characters in the rest of the novel.

Burney’s description of “nature’s” endowments, the blend of what we would consider physical appearance and character qualities, reveals the way she believes that one is connected to the other—and in very specific ways. For example, through Cecilia, she claims that one’s “countenance” can reveal “intelligence” (6). Intelligence enables a person to participate in interesting conversation, which can be an invaluable commodity

in both the retired environs of the countryside or the bustling circles of the city.11 When thrown into an awkward situation, Cecilia displays her “native dignity of mind” by maintaining her composure in a crowd of strangers and making conversation with those who nearly defy the art (22). In small, unvarying groups, a good conversationalist provides hours of relief from potential boredom; in the city, the endless round of repetitive entertainments renders an interesting conversation a novelty among those who have nothing new to say.

In addition to intelligence, Burney demonstrates that sincerity is an equally valuable quality. Cecilia’s “complexion [that] varied with every emotion of her soul” represents her lack of dissimulation (6). She does not hide what she feels, a quality that makes her stand out amidst the style of the day whereby women calculate their emotional displays in order to manipulate everyone around them. Most importantly,

Cecilia’s eyes convey all these qualities as they converge in perfect harmony. They are the source of her words, or “the heralds of her speech,” and they both match and reveal her degree of “understanding,” her ability to judge for herself, and her emotional responses. The structure of Burney’s sentences and the nature of Cecilia’s qualities emphasize a calculated balance between reason and emotion.

The most dominant theme when it comes to Cecilia’s interactions with every person in the novel—from her ill-chosen guardians, to her husband to be, to her various

11 Cecilia notes, for instance, that Mrs. Delvile’s “conversation would afford me more entertainment and instruction in a single day, than under this roof I should obtain in a twelvemonth” (166). At their next meeting, during their time together, Cecilia is delighted that their “conversation at once was lively and rational, and though general, was rendered interesting, by a reciprocation of good-will and pleasure in the conversers” (170). Similarly, Mortimer Delvile says to Cecilia, “the sight of you creates an insurmountable desire to converse with you, and your conversation a propensity equally incorrigible to take some interest in your welfare” (184-5).

suitors, to the true and false female friends she encounters—is that of the accord or discord between outer appearance and inner character. Early in the novel, the narrator notes that “what chiefly damped her hopes of forming a friendship with any of the new acquaintance to whom she was introduced, was the observation she herself made how ill the coldness of their hearts accorded with the warmth of their professions” (53). The way a character uses language reveals the inner qualities of the speaker; in a sense, their words are a kind of ‘tell’ that embodies the relationship between their inner and outer being which, taken together, reveals their true nature. In almost every instance,

Cecilia’s sharp mind and observant eye recognize the signs of discord. Here is where

Burney’s connection with her reader is most apparent, for without direct access to

Cecilia’s thoughts, the layered dynamic of her message would be lost.

Burney often shifts her criticisms of patriarchal society and her commentary on language onto male characters, which allows her greater freedom as an author. Critical comments made by male characters can be attributed to male authority so that, within the world of the novel, Burney can still maintain the proper “order” of things. She also uses a technique that later authors pick up—that of criticizing certain behaviors by aiming her critical commentary at a morally abhorrent character. For example, Cecilia’s first guardian, Mr. Harrel, exhibits a particular blindness to his financial situation, and

Cecilia finds herself in awe “at the sight of plans for new edifices when the workmen were yet unpaid for old ones; the cruel wantonness of raising fresh fabrics of expensive luxury, while those so lately built had brought their neglected labourers to ruin” (77). Mr.

Harrel’s numerous sins make it “safe” to criticize his behavior; however, in the broader sense, some of his practices upheld the very patriarchal structures Burney condemns in

the novel, such as dehumanizing the lower classes and creating wealth at the expense of women and the poor. Burney connects Mr. Harrel’s cruel luxury directly to the suffering of a woman with a name—with whom Cecilia interacts and sympathizes.

Burney allows this woman, the lowly Mrs. Hill, to speak for herself in the novel, and to contradict directly the false claims of a man hiding behind the veneer of a home and a title. When Cecilia conveys Mr. Harrel’s dismissive message that he will pay her another day, Mrs. Hill refutes it as a lie: “‘Tomorrow, madam … that is always his honour’s speech, but … when I told him I had not help now, for I had lost my Billy, he had the heart to say, so much the better, there’s one the less of you.’” (85). The critical effect of

Mrs. Hill’s speech in this scene is threefold: she has spoken on her own behalf, she has gained the protection of a more powerful woman, and she has revealed the false nature of the “speech” of a man. For Cecilia, Mrs. Hill’s revelation becomes part of a darker series of revelations about the nature of humanity, for “[t]his speech opened to Cecilia a new view of life; that a young man could appear so gay and happy, yet be guilty of such injustice and humanity … seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto she had supposed them impossible” (85). Burney’s small addition of “he had the heart to say” is the darkest irony, since it reveals the most disgusting part of his character, as well as marking the beginning of Cecilia’s revelation of the dissonance between language and appearance.

As a cautious author, Burney enacts the harshest critiques through male characters, who all act in the guise of educating young Cecilia in the ways of the city.

Burney demonstrates adeptly the way numerous people manipulate and misuse language for their own ends. Collectively, this commentary paints a vivid picture of the

fluidity of language within society. Burney makes amusing observations on superficial characters, giving them accurate but hyperbolic titles, harkening back to the language of allegory. For instance, Captain Arasby is a “Jargonist” who uses only copied language and who has “not a word to make use of that he has not picked up at public places”

(281). As a study of his character, however, his choice to omit original thought is intentional, “for though his phrases are almost always ridiculous or misapplied,” by which he reveals his ignorance, “they are selected with much study, and introduced with infinite pains” (280). Captain Arasby’s practice of using everyone around him toward his own ends can be seen in the way he quite literally uses the language and phrases of others rather than taking the time to come up with his own. His words are so disconnected from his thoughts that they lose meaning in misapplication and, as they are often borrowed from other languages, have the additional problem of being ‘lost in translation.’ His focus is so trained upon his goal of manipulation that he has no room left for language connected with truth.

Burney’s next target is the “Supercilious” set. Their representative, Miss Leeson, can “only speak to her own Coterie [so that] she is compelled to be frequently silent, and therefore, having nothing to think of, she is commonly knawn with self-denial” (280).

Through self-imposed silences and endlessly self-referential conversations, this set end up lacking internal selves; their language gradually empties itself of meaning in its repetition. Her opposite, the “Voluable,” Miss Larolles, speaks too many words. Miss

Larolles is always “talking faster than she thinks,” so that her words become empty signifiers sent out with an equal lack of substance (280). Burney creates scenes in which her ignorance of meaning creates contradictions that, while amusing, render

words meaningless.12 Although we alternately laugh at or pity them, these characters reveal their flaws through their abuses of language; in different ways, each one disconnects meaning from words and words from the context in which they should be spoken.

Burney spends a bit more time on the character Mr. Meadows, who flouts language and communication in his ill use of both. He too receives an allegorical title; as the head of the “Insensibilists … he is now in the very height of fashionable favour: his dress is a model, his manners are imitated, his attention is courted, and his notice is envied” (278). Burney focuses on the manner by which he achieves this power over the masses, in spite of his utter disregard for verbal communication. Mr. Meadows ignores everyone who speaks to him, responds incorrectly to inquiries because he does not listen to what is said, asks questions but does not bother listening to the answers, and attends nearly every fashionable social event, yet affects boredom and a desire to be elsewhere at all times. His speech and actions are rife with contradiction; he enacts all the outer forms of communication are enacted, but he empties them of meaning to the point of absurdity. The deeper absurdity lies in the social desire for this kind of empty discourse, since his (in)attention and favor is sought by all. Mr. Meadows’ ability to influence culture is his most intriguing quality. As Mr. Gosport puts it:

By nothing but a happy art in catching the reigning foibles of the times, and carrying them to an extreme yet more absurd than any one had done

12 Austen recalls this character in Persuasion, when Anne goes to a great deal of trouble to maneuver herself closer to Captain Wentworth at a concert: “… by some other removals, and a little scheming of her own, Anne was enabled to place herself much nearer the end of the bench than she had been before, much more within reach of a passer-by. She could not do so without comparing herself with Miss Larolles, the inimitable Miss Larolles; but still she did it” (206). Anne seems to reflect upon her behavior as silly and girlish, like “the inimitable Miss Larolles,” who spent most of her time maneuvering among social circles in a vain attempt to catch at the latest fashion. In Anne’s case, she only wants to catch Captain Wentworth (206).

before him. Ceremony, he found, was already exploded for ease, he, therefore, exploded ease for indolence; devotion to the fair sex, had given way to a more equal and rational intercourse, which, to push still farther, he presently exchanged for rudeness; joviality, too, was already banished for philosophical indifference, and that, therefore, he discarded, for weariness and disgust. (278)

This example is a negative one; yet Burney captures perfectly the manner by which a combination of understood cultural terms can be altered in the medium of public intercourse. Here is Johnson’s living language, through which men, women, and authors can alter fashion or “the world” by changing the meaning of words, the meanings of actions, and in doing so, change the culture itself. In each case she takes a culturally charged term and shows the way that its usage in everyday life crosses into the novel and back again in order to alter its meaning. To create the changes she describes, women writers make use of the symbiotic relationship between language and its cultural and temporal usage (278). However, unlike Mr. Meadows, women authors had to work within narrower confines to utilize this “happy art” of “catching the reigning foibles of the times.”

Through its circulation in society, the meaning of a word becomes part of the public’s ongoing debate of the governing “rules” for both the social enactment and the accepted meaning of a word—for one cannot be separated from the other. The accepted meaning of the word at any given time cannot—at least in part—be separated from the governing rules of what is fashionable (or unfashionable) at that time. The word exists in a state of constant flux between its former connotations, the rules by which it operated in the social context of former times, and its new contexts, which are emerging and evolving in the ever-changing present. By capturing words in this state of flux,

women authors like Burney were able to participate in the alterations of meaning that influenced cultural structures upon which they otherwise had no other influence.

If we look for a moment at Burney’s example of Mr. Meadows, we see that her first examples are remarkably apt in describing several different ways such changes happen. In the first, broader cultural and linguistic changes are described as they occurred in the long eighteenth century; “ceremony,” which in this context means forms of address and social conventions, were discarded or “exploded” and quickly replaced by less rigid rules. In the second examples, Burney captures a social moment that she wishes to set forth as desirable in her text, one during which a “devotion to the fairer sex, had given way to a more equal and rational discourse” (278). However, she follows this up with what must be the degradation of such an ideal, a time when this “rational discourse” dissolves into a rudeness which, while vague, we may take to mean first the behavior of a man like Mr. Meadows who utterly rejects the words, and therefore the minds, of women.

Mr. Gosport’s conclusion that “the trick grows into habit, and habit is a second nature” takes us back to Johnson’s deep fears for the degradation of language through the medium of society (281). Put another way, repetition in speech spreads by circulation, fashion, and popularity. Women novelists like Burney took advantage of this feature to pick up from, alter, and return phrases and ideas into the public sphere. The author’s pen creates new habits of conduct, understanding and ultimately new meanings. Thus novels allowed women writers to have the power to change the world.

No wonder such anxiety surrounded the reading of novels by young ladies.

Women in the World – The Language of Masks

In addition to her character gallery’s association with language, Burney can again be seen engaging in dialogue with her audience in a masterful chapter about a masque.

In a situation where people come to see and be seen, Burney demonstrates how a lady might use language to turn the objectifying gaze back toward those who impose it upon her, although such a skill cannot free her from the restraints of her female body. After a certain amount of experience in “the world,” Cecilia has become accustomed to being an object of the male gaze; however, Burney suggests that her lack of conceit among those who disguise their true natures empowers her to turn this gaze around. At the masque, “her curiosity to watch others” allows her to ignore “how much she was watched herself” (106). She spends most of her time entertained, or as Burney describes it, with “her attention unwearied [by] the conceited efforts at wit, the total thoughtlessness of consistency, and the ridiculous incongruity of the language with the appearance” (106). This awareness of the incongruity of language allows Cecilia to reverse the male gaze and take a degree of agency, even though it is only an internalized, narrative voice.

This scene is in many ways representative of the whole novel; the characters dress and act as exaggerated versions of themselves and the message is somewhat obtuse: one’s public self is the true mask. Cecilia wears no mask; she is content to observe others and, theoretically, has nothing to hide. Young Delvile, the love interest, appears as a “domino of no character,”13 leaving him open to be written anew as a

13 Delvile’s appearance of one of the “Dominos of no character” holds particular interest in contrast to Burney’s careful cast of fools—the footnote indicates that a “domino is a loose cloak, perhaps modeled on the garment worn by a priest … worn with a half mask” (106, 966).

uniquely eighteenth century creation of Burney’s authorial imagination. Delvile is a flawed hero because in spite of his lack of deception, he still hides behind a mask. As a domino he still lacks “character,” or any essential substance. He confirms this symbolic beginning later in the novel through his continued inability or refusal to act at crucial moments when doing so would have saved Cecilia from danger or embarrassment. The masque becomes, in a sense, a parade of folly. Only Cecilia appears as she is, sincere, unadorned by false language or apparel. The cruelty of her “station” lies in the make-up of the complex bonds that hold her in “captivity,” which are made of masculine aggression, authority, and the dictates of social custom (107).

Surrounded by men in pursuit of her fortune and her beauty, Cecilia becomes trapped. Divided from her friends and a proper escort, she finds herself in a crowd, yet she can “neither speak nor be spoken to” (111). Through a mock-heroic scene, Delvile releases her from this imprisonment, and then offers her “congratulations upon her recovered freedom,” which essentially adds him to the egotistical list of suitors, since he is merely congratulating himself for releasing her. In this moment, another recurring theme of the novel emerges; Cecilia responds, “I was so tired of confinement, that my mind seemed almost as little at liberty as my person” (112). In this simple statement,

Burney reveals one uncomfortable truth of eighteenth century society—that the lively, thinking minds of women suffer and deteriorate within their socially captive bodies.

Delvile misses this cue in his attempts to approach her along the accepted forms of flattery, thereby making himself an even less inviting suitor. He turns the conversation toward a metaphorical play upon the notion of her ability to reverse her situation through her beauty. Rather than sympathize with her situation as one harassed by an

aggressive suitor dressed up as the Devil, even Delvile assumes that the man has some “right” to pay her such addresses, based on the forms of society. He assumes that such behavior originates in the man’s claims to Cecilia’s hand:

there are many who would be happy to confine you in the same manner; neither have you much cause for complaint; you have, doubtless, been the aggressor, and played this game yourself without mercy, for I read in your face the captivity of thousands: have you, then, any right to be offended at the spirit of retaliation which one, out of such numbers, has courage to exert in return? (emphasis mine 112)

His language, though playful, underscores the aggressive, possessive nature of male/female relationships. Cecilia’s first-person account through the narrative, if not through her outward conversation, clarifies the socially constructed mind/body divide that Delvile has missed. To Delvile, she has the masculine power to become an

“aggressor” and play “this game yourself without mercy”; however, he does not see that such power is only a displaced power, for it is sent forth in the masculine gaze upon its object and exercised only so long as the gaze remains fixed on its object. Once the masculine gaze—along with its attendant powers of marriage and status—shifts away,

Cecilia will remain a passive, symbolic object. Thus, Delvile’s hyperbolic claim that “I read in your face the captivity of thousands” falls flat in the face of Cecilia’s plainspoken language.

Throughout this scene, and throughout the novel, the men talk on and on about themselves, about her, about society and their ideas. They create “the world” through their words—a world through which Cecilia must navigate. Cecilia’s words, mostly internal, occasionally spoken aloud, gain emphasis only in their role as the first person consciousness available to the narrator. Her inner dialogue, accessible to the reader, has the secondary, equally powerful effect of overriding the “dominant” discourse of the

day by becoming the foregrounded, authoritative voice of the narrative. The shrinking, submissive, silent heroine does, in fact, have the power to captivate thousands; however, Burney shifts this power from her body to her mind. Her thoughts and ideas— her version of events, her interpretations of the world, her “chosen language” become the reader’s guide. (Northanger Abbey 31).

Burney chooses to present a heroine who has the power to captivate thousands with her words and not her face or body. She can, with great irony, allow Cecilia to become a mind at liberty even though her body is not, by allowing her to make observations and to read others as freely as they read her. Although Cecilia cannot speak in the world of the novel, Burney can circumvent the constraints that burden

Cecilia as a woman and speak directly to society about those constraints.

The Language of Female Friendship – “Schemes of Happiness”

Cecilia’s “problems” in the novel can be viewed in several layers. On the broad scale, they are social problems—as a woman she has limited mobility and access to her own money. As a result, she has almost no control of her own belongings or her own destiny. On a more basic level, her immediate problems stem largely from a lack of friends and family. At the beginning of the novel, she is cast adrift into the world and, through a succession of trials and failures, she finds that those who might take interest in her well-being are either too self-involved to care, or are actively involved in taking advantage of her.

What Cecilia needs are friends—in every sense of the word as it was defined at the time. The very first page of Cecilia locates the heroine bereft of her “natural” friends, or her relations. However, a friend need not be a blood relation to meet all the needs expressed throughout the novel for companionship, domestic happiness, and

assistance in society. At the end of the eighteenth century, Burney was one of the first women authors to focus a novel on the search for the kind of friendship that, in the course of its composition, began to expand Johnson’s (traditional, masculine) definition.

Sharon Marcus has argued that the plot of “female amity” can parallel the courtship plot by having a plot of its own, complete with an initiation, complications, and a resolution (82). This became a pattern in the novels of the women writers who followed in Burney’s footsteps. For example, though Cecilia had “natural friends” in her early life, in her adult life she first encounters a false friend in the person of Mrs. Harrel, much in the same way that a heroine will come across false suitors before meeting the

“true” one in a romance. Cecilia quickly finds that Mrs. Harrel lacks the qualities essential in a true friend. Mrs. Harrel does not even understand what the word friend means, for upon Cecilia’s entrance into her home, Mrs. Harrel told her that she invited some friends to welcome her. Instead, Cecelia found herself in a house crowded with strangers. Cecilia had “from the word friends, expected to have seen a small and private party, selected for the purpose of social converse” (22). Mrs. Harrel’s use of the word reveals her lack of true friends, as defined by Cecilia, along with her own shallow character. This shallowness renders her incapable of making or maintaining the more exalted bonds of female friendship as it will be defined through other characters in the novel. Burney sets up a search for female friendship as Cecilia’s first personal goal in the novel: “To a heart formed for friendship and affection the charms of solitude are very short-lived … she now wearied of passing all her time by herself, and sighed for the comfort of society, and the relief of communication” (130-131). Burney’s message is unequivocal. Her heroine does not set out in life pining for a man to fulfill her juvenile

fantasies; rather, she is a sensible woman in need of rational female friends with whom she can find shared interests and lively conversation. Likewise, although the genre of the novel suggests that Cecilia’s relationship with young Delvile should be of primary interest, her need for female friendship motivates her actions much more than her desire to marry. One could even make the argument that the female friendship plot is primary for most of the novel, and that it ends in tragedy, rendering the secondary courtship plot a rather hollow happy ending.

Cecilia’s disappointment in her friendship with Mrs. Harrel becomes the catalyzing event for her self-motivated actions in London. Mrs. Harrel’s deficiencies help define the qualities of a positive female friend, as Cecilia either implies or finds that she needs them in their absence. For instance, Cecilia expects that living in a house with another woman, even one who is married, will inspire each of them to make “the society of each other their chief happiness,” a phrase that captures precisely the critical role of female friends (34). Female friends guarantee that the hours of the day, and many of those in the evening, will be filled will the comfort of companionship and the joys of shared activities. Cecilia also found “she had mistaken the kindness of childish intimacy for the sincerity of chosen affection,” a mistake she corrects in pursuit of more appropriate companions (54). As an adult, she realizes that choice has replaced chance once she has the discernment to know what she wants.

At this point, Cecilia makes a very important decision. She takes control of her time and her choice of companions. Burney calls this a “scheme of happiness at once rational and refined,” a phrase that resonates through the novel as Cecilia searches for ways to make her life meaningful, her actions just, and her relationships fulfilling: “She

purposed, for the basis of her plan, to become mistress of her own time, and with this view, to drop all idle and uninteresting acquaintance,” by which means “she could then shew some taste and discernment in her choice of friends, and she resolved to select such only as by their piety could elevate her mind, by their knowledge improve her understanding, or by their accomplishments and manners delight her affections” (55).

The key to happiness, in the youthful mind of Cecilia, lies in choice and agency. She learns quickly that relinquishing her time to the dictates of others is wearying, and that spending all of her time in the company of those who are mentally stimulating and with whom she can share emotional connections brings her great happiness. As the novel progresses, these qualities unfold within two primary female friendships—one with Mrs.

Delvile and one with Henrietta Belfield. The former fulfills her need for intellectual stimulation while the latter emphasizes her need for emotional companionship.

Female Companionship—Sympathy of Mind

Cecilia meets her first real female friend, Mrs. Delvile, when she seeks the help of one of her guardians. Since her former experience with the haughty Mr. Delvile Sr. prepared her to meet with a wife of equal egotism, Cecilia has the unexpected pleasure of finding a nearly perfect female friend where she thought she would encounter more arrogance and rejection.

Cecilia’s description of her first impressions of Mortimer Delvile (her guardian’s son), the man she will eventually marry, is limited to a short paragraph; however, her description of Mrs. Delvile (his mother) runs on for over a page, which reinforces the idea that Cecilia falls within the range of Sharon Marcus’ conception of the “plot of female amity” as a driving force (82). From the outset, Cecilia has been compelled by her desire to finding female companionship much more than any need for finding a

husband. Where Cecilia is reserved in her admiration of Mr. Delvile, she is effusive in her praise of Mrs. Delvile: “… the moment Cecilia beheld her … that respect which the formalities of her introduction had failed to inspire, her air, figure, and countenance instantaneously excited” (155). Mrs. Delvile is equally taken with Cecilia:

The surprise and admiration with which Cecilia at the first glance was struck proved reciprocal: Mrs. Delvile, though prepared for youth and beauty, expected not to see a countenance so intelligent, nor manners so well formed as those of Cecilia: thus mutually astonished and mutually pleased, their first salutations were accompanied by looks so flattering to both, that each saw in the other, an immediate prepossession in her favour, and from the moment that they met, they seemed instinctively impelled to admire. (155)

Cecilia reserves her judgment and emotional responses to Mortimer Delvile, but trusts and attaches herself to Mrs. Delvile immediately. Throughout their growing intimacy,

Burney emphasizes these “mutual” feelings and the likeness of their minds – Cecilia has

“intelligence”; Mrs. Delvile is “lively and rational” (170). Both the narrator and Mortimer

Delvile recognize this as a sympathetic bond and, long after the meeting between the two women, when their friendship has been tested several times, Mortimer says of his mother to Cecilia that he is “certain of your sympathetic affection for a character so resembling your own” (519). Therefore, through her negative portrayal of Mrs. Harrell and her extensive positive example of Mrs. Delvile, Burney demonstrates that the first desirable quality of a female friendship is sympathy of mind.

Burney portrays Cecilia’s friendship with Mrs. Delvile’s as one that takes priority in Cecilia’s heart to that of her relationship with Mortimer. Nonetheless, Burney sets their friendship up as a model for companionate marriage—and for domestic happiness—by developing parallels between Mrs. Delvile and her son. She consistently places the character descriptions together and makes Cecilia’s relationships with one

dependent on the other. Within the context of eighteenth century family dynamics, and particularly within the context of women’s lives, this parallel makes sense and legitimates Cecilia’s quest for both male and female companionship in her marriage.

Cecilia considers “friendship the first of human blessings, and social converse the greatest of human enjoyments,” from which she expects to find a “companion for the hours of retirement” (164). For women in the eighteenth century, “hours of retirement” comprised the greater portion of their lives, during which the time spent with female companions far outnumbered their hours spent with men. Considered in this light, we might think of their relationships with other women primary relationships, rendering a good female friend in many ways as valuable as a good husband. Aside from her admiration of Mrs. Delvile, it is likely that Cecilia’s anxiety to be in good standing with and enjoy the company of this woman originated here. If married to her son, Cecilia might well have spent a great deal more time with Mrs. Delvile than with her son

Mortimer! Eighteenth-century women really did marry a man’s family and acquaintance, particularly when we consider the ways their time was conscripted by those people.

Burney gives one of the clearest descriptions of the companionate ideal—a connection of two people that is equal on both a mental and emotional level—during

Cecilia’s stay with the Delviles:

More and more pleased with the inmates of her new habitation, she found in the abilities of Mrs Delvile sources inexhaustible of entertainment, and, in the disposition and sentiments of her son something so concordant to her own, that almost every word he spoke shewed the sympathy of their minds, and almost every look which caught her eyes was a reciprocation of intelligence. (emphasis mine 241)

In Mrs. Delvile, Cecilia finds a sympathy that originates in the mind. Through this friendship, Burney emphasizes the value of companionship fueled by intelligence and

reason—two qualities that some segments of eighteenth century society claimed women could neither develop nor possess.

Female Companionship—Sympathy of heart

Cecilia finds her second important female friendship in Henrietta Belfield, with whom she finds a sympathetic connection on the basis of emotion rather than the mind.

Although Cecilia admires Henrietta upon their first meeting, a friendship does not form until they find common ground by sharing their stories. Essentially, the mode of their connection is through language and the emotion it evokes. For the eighteenth-century woman, emotion can be both valuable and volatile. Following the social protocol of the day, the communication of feelings and intimate details about inner and outer experience indicated a degree of intimacy in any relationship. Women did not share any inclinations they felt toward a man, nor any details about their families that might be considered embarrassing or indelicate. Even Mrs. Delvile knows she must “acquire the right” to Cecilia’s confidence, though she believes that she sees “openness” in Cecilia’s

“countenance”; she “mean[s] to claim” this right through their growing friendship” (159).

This type of sharing forms the foundation of Cecilia’s and Henrietta’s friendship.

Cecilia’s true friendship with Henrietta Belfield begins when, prompted by the prophetic character of Albany to “[t]ell her thy story, plainly, roundly, truly … young as ye both are, with many years and many sorrows to encounter, lighten the burthen of each other's cares” (206). His insight into their respective situations (whether through prophesy or nosiness) allows him to add that “like you, she is an orphan, though not like you, an heiress;—like her, you are fatherless, though not like her friendless! … commiserate her therefore now,—by and by she may commiserate you" (emphasis in original 207). Here Albany hits on the affective values of female friendship; founded on

sympathy, these relationships provide reciprocal emotional support. In this example, sympathy breaks down the barriers of class by suggesting that the women’s situations in life are circumstantial, making alliances based on character and esteem more valuable than those based on status. Cecilia verifies this sentiment after the first exchange of life stories as she leaves Henrietta – “Gentle, amiable girl! may the future recompense you for the past, and may Mr Albany's kind wishes be fulfilled in the reciprocation of our comfort and affection!” (214). Henrietta’s disclosure of her family’s embarrassing financial situation to Cecilia indicates great trust in her (225). By emphasizing character rather than class or Henrietta’s financial situation, Cecilia cements the newly “reciprocal” nature of the relationship.

Cecilia shows far more emotional attachment and physical affection in her relationship with Henrietta than she does with Mrs. Delvile. From its inception, Cecilia was drawn to Henrietta emotionally whereas with Mrs. Delvile, her feelings of admiration and connectedness related to the mind. This overflow of emotion can be seen during one of the two major crisis points of this relationship in the novel, when the continued friendship is in jeopardy. After she has been threatened with the loss of Cecilia’s friendship, Miss Belfield’s response to being reunited with her resembles that of a lover;

Cecilia’s reaction is equally warm:

[Henrietta] then embraced her affectionately, and owned she had been more mortified by her fancied desertion than she had been willing to own even to herself, repeatedly assuring her that for many years she had not made any acquaintance she so much wished to cultivate, nor enjoyed any society from which she had derived so much pleasure. Cecilia, whose eyes glistened with modest joy, while her heart beat quick with revived expectation, in listening to an effusion of praise so infinitely grateful to her, found little difficulty in returning her friendly professions, and, in a few minutes, was not merely reconciled, but more firmly united with her than ever. (359)

Two things can be drawn from this warm reunion. First, Cecilia’s reasons for continuing her relationship with Henrietta originate in the deep pleasure she takes in her company.

She soon exhibits the depth of her affection by revealing her full plan to take Henrietta into her home as a companion. This plan fulfills that first “scheme of happiness” expressed when Mrs. Harrel turned out to be such a disappointing friend. When

Henrietta comes to live with her, Cecilia says that she has

a friend to oblige, and a companion to converse with. She communicated to her all her schemes, and made her the partner of her benevolent excursions; she found her disposition as amiable upon trial, as her looks and her manners had been engaging at first sight; and her constant presence and constant sweetness, imperceptibly revived her spirits, and gave a new interest to her existence. (794)

Second, the ‘reconciliation’ after a crisis positions this relationship as a fully developed and independent plotline within the novel. Cecilia’s effusive relief at finding the friendship restored demonstrates the degree of crisis created.14

14 As I explained in my Introduction, this is the kind of female friendship that some theorists would read as a “romantic friendship,” complete with its associated sexual subtext. Even taking into consideration Cecilia’s alternate plan for their life together—I do not believe that the text supports such a reading. To begin, the nature of women’s friendship at the time accounts for the effusive nature of their physical affection for one another. Additionally, a secondary part of the sub-plot involves the fact that both women are in love with Mortimer Delvile. Since both women believe that Delvile is out of reach for them, Burney emphasizes the sympathy created between them by this circumstance. The plan to live together is a direct result of their belief that neither can marry him. A meeting between the ladies later in the novel after a time apart brings this issue of women’s physical affection—and its degree of social acceptability at the time—into the fore. When the ladies greet one another Henrietta “flung her arms round [Cecilia’s] neck, and embraced her with the most rapturous emotion” (725). Although Henrietta hesitates when she thinks she might be displaying a “want of respect … Cecilia, charmed at a reception so ingenuously affectionate, soon satisfied her doubting diffidence by the warmest thanks that she had preserved so much regard for her, and by doubling the kindness with which she returned her caresses” (725). The implication seems to be that the problem is one of class, not the degree of friendship. However, a rude man in the room comments that “young ladies … have a mighty way of saluting [i.e. kissing] one another till such time as they get husbands: and then I’ll warrant you that they can meet without any salutation at all,” which naturally embarrasses Cecilia into toning down the physical advances of Henrietta (725, 996). Burney uses this character, who is rude throughout, to bring forth the kinds of tacky truths others will not say. At the same time, his assessments of Cecilia are crass and unfailingly wrong. Considered in this light, we can read this situation as Burney’s frank acknowledgement that such things do happen between women, just as critics from Faderman forward have argued. However, it is not likely to be an accurate interpretation of the relationship between Cecilia and Henrietta. If anything, it represents Burney’s pointed refusal to allow a man’s attempt to sexualize their relationship to trivialize the value of their friendship.

Henrietta’s brief residence in Cecilia’s home, before Mortimer Delvile reenters to take back up the “proper” courtship plot, points toward a trend that some wealthy, unmarried women were able to achieve—that of taking other women into their homes as companions.15 In Cecilia, Burney offers an alternative that points toward egalitarian relationships based upon character rather than one that mirrors the power dynamics of a traditional marriage.

At one point, Henrietta Belfield expresses a sentiment that explores a wish that many women writers—and no doubt women in general—had for marriage. Henrietta says of her relationship with Cecilia, one that is by its nature situated within social structures of money and power,

I have wished a thousand and a thousand times that I could but shew you my affection, and let you see that I did not love you because you were a great lady, and high in the world, and full of power to do me service, but because you were so good and so kind, so gentle to the unfortunate, and so sweet to every body! (441)

Were such a wish answered, their relationship would be founded upon equal ground; as

Henrietta intimates, it is Cecilia’s position as “a great lady … full of power” that makes

Henrietta’s love for her suspect, since Henrietta cannot reciprocate the “favors” that

Cecilia does for her. Under these conditions true equality cannot exist between them.

However, Burney’s manipulations of the plot late in the novel allow Henrietta to prove herself; for when Cecilia is no longer a “great lady … full of power,” Henrietta’s love for

15 See Betty Rizzo’s complete discussion of this trend in Companions without Vows, which I briefly overview in Chapter 1. Earlier in the text, Mr. Harrel alludes to this practice when he, desperate to make sure his wife will be taken care of after he kills himself, petitions Cecilia to take her into her home as companion and, in doing so, take on her expenses and upkeep. From a financial perspective, a wealthy woman takes on the role of a husband in the sense that she is responsible for the “maintenance” and physical welfare of another woman. This example, however, is a very negative example of what Burney develops as a positive one with Henrietta and Cecilia.

her does not change. As a relationship in which economic barriers do not dictate or overshadow the sincerity of affection and neither party has the power to hold any sense of financial obligation over the other, this friendship manages to model briefly a truly equal companionate marriage. A more subversive reading of Cecilia’s relationship with

Henrietta might suggest that Burney presents their friendship as an alternative plotline.

Through it, Burney gives her readers a glimpse of women’s possibilities beyond marriage if they had the power to both resist the pull of love and marriage and if they had the resources to live independently.16

The Language of Emotion

Considering the novel’s placement in the proper, acceptable genre of the courtship novel, Cecilia’s marriage to Mr. Delvile is fairly inevitable. In the framework of eighteenth-century society, marriage is the best safety net for her physical and financial security. Within it lies the more realistic version of life through which Cecilia must attempt to find happiness. Before she met Mortimer Delvile, Cecilia attempted to carve out a life for herself filled with friends, reading, and charitable works; once she meets him “her mind [is] occupied by new ideas, and her fancy [is] busied in the delineation of new prospects” (251). However, Burney has a singular way of conveying the experience of falling in love, for at every step, Cecilia seems to battle against what amounts to a surrender. Even in “her first meeting [with] young Delvile” she is “struck … with an involuntary admiration of his manners and conversation” (emphasis mine 251). Although

16 Cecilia’s friendship with Henrietta Belfield shares many parallels with Emma’s relationship with Harriett Smith. Like Cecilia, Emma must encounter the awkward consequences of discovering that her protégé is in love with the man she will eventually marry. However, neither of them is secure of his affections at the time (350). Cecilia “was suddenly in a conjuncture of all others the most delicate, that of accidentally discovering a rival in a favourite friend” (351). Also, in Cecilia, Mr. Delvile is referred to several times as a “knight.”

she feels “for him a rising partiality which made her always see him with pleasure,”

Burney characterizes Cecilia as one who is “not of that inflammable nature which is always ready to take fire, as her passions were under the controul of her reason, and she suffered not her affections to triumph over her principles,” a quality in which Cecilia takes particular pride (251). However, when Cecilia recognizes her “rising partiality” for him, Burney describes her response rather dramatically: Cecilia “started at her danger the moment she perceived it, and instantly determined to give no weak encouragement to a prepossession which neither time nor intimacy had justified” (251). Throughout the remainder of the text Burney evokes language of freedom and captivity, of both mind and body, to describe the feelings and actions of the courting couple. At its inception,

Cecilia describes being in love with Delvile as a “loss of mental freedom” that is simultaneously “the choice of her heart,” and yet “involuntary” (252). Even this phrase, her “loss of mental freedom,” echoes the one she uses with him on their first meeting, when she describes her place in the masque, hemmed in on all sides by a combination of social protocols and the threat of physical assault if she moves too far outside the safety of the public eye, wherein her “mind seemed almost as little at liberty as [her] person” (112). In Delvile, she can only rejoice that this “choice … was approved by her principles, and confirmed by her judgment,” suggesting that she has only marginally escaped danger by giving in to her emotions with a man whose intellect and morality is worthy of her affections. Burney does not seem to allow much room for any positive emotional interaction between men and women – even those destined for one another.

This holds true throughout the novel; for every choice Cecilia makes under the influence of her devotion to Delvile drives her toward her own potential ruin. Cecilia’s professions

of happiness are so sprinkled with negative qualifiers that she cannot help but reveal her blended feelings about being married, though Delvile seems to be the best of men.

As though foreshadowing what will become the most dramatic metaphor for this circumstance, a conversation between several men and Cecilia rather early in the novel alludes to Cecilia’s mind and body, and their place in the world. Her character, as recognized by those who see and value her, is trapped inside a female body. Various parties interject their opinions on the degree to which ladies, and people in general, should be influenced by the “maxims of the world” which are, it should be noted, “not avowedly delivered as a precept from parents to children [but] nevertheless so universally recommended by example, that those who act differently, incur general censure for affecting singularity” (14). After Cecilia insists that she will determine her own course of action based upon what she thinks best, Mr. Belfield sums it up best when he says, “You intend, then, madam … in defiance of these maxims of the world, to be guided by the light of your own understanding” (14). As we have seen, Cecilia does at various points in the novel attempt to do just this, but her efforts are repeatedly thwarted by the essential patriarchal structure by which her fortune and life choices are dictated.

Burney finds a way to respond by utilizing the method mentioned before—that of placing words in the mouth of a male character rather than having Cecilia direct attention to her gender by saying them herself. Cecilia simply makes one important statement about her autonomy, and then sits in silence while the men in the room discuss it. Mr. Belfield takes up her cause when he corrects Mr. Moncton’s twisting of

Cecilia’s words by saying, “I presume … Miss Beverley does not mean to convey her

person to town, and leave her understanding locked up, with other natural curiosities, in the country? … Do you suppose that because she is to take leave of you, she is to take leave of herself?” (16). This clarification is particularly important in light of Burney’s attention to Cecilia’s ability to rely upon her own mind and her need for the knowledge and understanding of others. Burney emphasizes the importance of seeing women as both a mind and a body, adding a touch of sarcasm to the notion that a woman who possesses “understanding” is a “natural curiosity” (16). More importantly, Burney makes a direct connection between the “understanding,” or relative strength of mind, and the self. Belfield’s humorous statement makes clear the absurdity of utter dependence upon the masculine mind, in addition to making clear that the mind constitutes the individual, even a female one. Burney claims from the beginning that Cecilia cannot take leave of herself, though she stakes this claim through the idealistic voice of the poet Belfield.

Still, she dares to say that an unmarried woman can possess herself, mind and body.

Perhaps, when we consider the novel in its entirety, Burney only says that such things are possible in the world of the poet’s imagination—in the world as it should be.

In terms of plot structure, Burney differs from later women authors by focusing more on the conflict between a static self and an antagonistic social structure. In this way, her novels are social problem novels, although they take a deeply psychological angle, showing the way the individual experiences the world, illustrating the way that the self is shaped—and in Cecilia’s case, marred—by the world in which she lives.

Being in the World - Names, Words, and Castles

This essential interiority created by author and heroine creates a direct connection with the reader. Burney doesn’t deliver her social commentary abstractly but

intimately in a way that foregrounds women’s concerns. Although she speaks of society at large, Burney has specific things to say to her women readers. These readers, regardless of their financial situations, can identify with Cecilia’s struggle for self- ownership.

The question of whether Cecilia owns herself can be directly tied to whether she owns her own fortune, her estate, and her name. In one sense, the question of “reading” the multiple, layered meanings within this novel turns upon the “reading” of her uncle’s will, which amounts to a question of ownership—of her status as an heiress, her name, her rank, and the great question of to whom that great pile of money really belongs.

What a great mess of questions! Yet Burney sets up this tangled web of money, status, social and gender identity precisely because it creates the impossible bind that drives

Cecilia mad at the climax of the novel.

The essential problem with Cecilia’s potential marriage to Mortimer Delvile is that his family so vigorously refuses his giving up the family name – which is the stipulation given in Cecilia’s uncle’s will to maintain her fortune. As the last male in the Delvile line, the name will die with him. To them, he is less a son than a representative of their pride of heritage. Even his mother “seemed to regard his name and his existence as equally valuable” (546). Additionally, in spite of Cecilia’s great fortune, Mr. Delvile Sr. considers

Cecilia an inferior connection because she is descended from farmers. Cecilia wonders at Delvile’s objection to “the condition imposed by her uncle’s will of giving her own name to the man she married” which was “so common for an heiress, that it could

hardly out-weigh the many advantages of such a connection” (477).17 She is therefore unprepared entirely for the snobbery of Mr. Delvile Sr.

Burney’s introduction of the Delvile family reads much like the opening of

Austen’s Persuasion, with a description of the family patriarch, his pride in his illustrious lineage, and a special emphasis on the role that inheritance and ancestry play in every aspect of his being. The chapter title, “A Man of Family,” along with its content, plays with the dual connotations of the word family as it relates to both lineage and domesticity. He insists that appearances match his imagined rank amidst the finer

“distinctions of the world” which render him infinitely superior to anyone whose lineage does not resemble his own (98). Perhaps most tellingly, when referencing his disdain toward involvement in Cecilia’s affairs, he says he wishes to withdraw “both my name and my countenance,” making it clear that he considers them synonymous (98). In his mind, “countenance” means only appearance, when in fact Johnson’s Dictionary tells us that the word has the dual connotation of a man’s face and his character (1:495-496).18

Mr. Delvile’s usage does not contradict his character, yet Burney uses his words to challenge what he stands for—some of the more traditional, masculine cultural institutions of family, marriage, inheritance, and the structure of relationships. She plays

17 The Oxford Edition of Cecilia (2008) gives added insight into this eighteenth-century phenomenon, citing several historical examples, as well as the well-known fictional example in Thackeray’s “The Luck of Barry Lyndon.” Of particular import to this study, James Boswell claims that Samuel Johnson “objected vigorously to the name clause,” stating that “An ancient estate should always go to males. It is mighty foolish to let a stranger have it because he marries your daughter, and takes your name’” (from Life of Johnson, ii. 261, qtd. in Cecilia 988).

18 Johnson’s full definition: “1. The form of the face; the system of the features. 2. Air; manner. 3. Calmness of look; composure of face. 4. Confidence of mien; aspect of assurance: it is commonly used in these phrases; in countenance; out of countenance. 5. Kindness or ill-will, as it appears on the face. 6. Patronage; appearance of favour; appearance of support; appearance on any side; support. 7. Superficial appearance, show, resemblance.

with the fluid nature of many of the words associated with these institutions, some more blatantly than others.

Mortimer Delvile also becomes complicit in the institutions Burney criticizes through the novel; however, his position remains ambivalent because he initially makes several attempts to change his parents’ minds. When he decides to disobey his parents and attempt to persuade Cecilia to marry him in spite of their disapproval; he says “in matters so serious, it is weakness to be shackled by scruples so frivolous, and it is cowardly to be governed by customs we condemn” (676). However, Mrs. Delvile, in spite of her love for Cecilia, comes down on the side of patrilineage. She counters

Mortimer’s speech by calling his notions “independent happiness,” a kind that cannot be supported without the wider approbation of mankind and the more immediate circle of his family, underscoring her warning by reminding him that he is “involving Miss

Beverley in such disgrace” (676). Cecilia’s refusal to marry him has hinged upon having the approval of his family, for she also understands that “independent happiness” with

Delvile would involve the loss of Mrs. Delvile’s friendship and isolation from the rest of society. To her son, though, Mrs. Delvile threatens added layers of misery in the loss of the family name and of his father’s blessing. Such a picture carries weight with Delvile, and to the idea of his father cursing him, Mrs. Delvile adds the vivid image of his own shame with the question that becomes the killing blow in her argument—“How will the blood of your wronged ancestors rise into your guilty cheeks, and how will your heart throb with secret shame and reproach, when wished joy upon your marriage by the name of Mr. Beverley!” (677). Finally, the ties of blood, name, land, and inheritance coalesce in this moment to explain the true problem of the novel—for if Mortimer gives

up his family name, he forfeits all the rest, and the very blood within his veins will arise in protest. In this moment, Mortimer comes to represent all that feminism defines as patriarchy; he is the literal embodiment of the cultural and social institutions of male inheritance, male dominion of land, estates, homes, and all who live in them. Mortimer

Delvile stands for primogeniture, for which the passing on of the family name remains essential. In spite of his best intentions, giving up this role would destroy Mortimer as surely as a failure to marry according to the dictates of her uncle’s will destroy Cecilia.

The language of names, then, is the most powerful force in the novel. Names represent the male voice, the language of the world, power, money, inheritance.

But Burney pulls a sleight-of-hand; she answers these voices with the novel itself—and demonstrates to her women readers how to do the same. How does Cecilia, as a novel, question, challenge, and undermine this system of blood, names, land, and inheritance? Essentially, she does what Johnson described in his “Preface”—she works with specific concepts as they are represented within the shifting connotations of words.

As Johnson described the act of translation, he compared individual words to distinct pebbles in a large edifice; through this metaphor he showed the potential for aggregate change as “native idiom[s]” took on new meanings in language (1:15).19

19 Johnson’s definition of “idiom” is standard and conforms to his rule of using examples from poets of previous decades (he uses Dryden and Prior), yet his definition of “idiomatical/idiomatick” breaks from this rule by citing as its source the Spectator (1: 994). His example is as follows: “Since phrases using conversation contract meaness by passing through the mouths of the vulgar, a poet should guard himself against idiomatick ways of speaking.” This example serves rather as a “proof” of his theory of translation in the “Preface” as well as introducing a gendered pronoun to the title of poet, although the Spectator reviewed poetry by women as well as men.

Jane Austen summarized Burney’s skills rather well when she mentioned her as one of the best examples of women novelists in Northanger Abbey.20 Austen recognized in her work the strongest tools in a women writer’s arsenal: “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour,” which “are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language” (38). In Cecilia, Burney portrays human nature in a variety of forms. She chooses her language with the precision of a master, both as an entertaining master of plot, and as a “translator” working within the idioms of the changing nature of relationships.

As she closes the novel, Burney solves some of its problems through the clever crafting of words. She uses a male character to show, in a comic manner, the way to manipulate a man’s own system of beliefs against him to attain his goals. In the line made famous by Jane Austen’s usage of it as the title for one of the best-known novels in the English language, Burney has the relatively minor character Dr. Lyster deliver the

“MORAL” (in all capital letters) of the story:

The whole of this unfortunate business … has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr. Mortimer, continued in the same self- partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife” (930).

20 Nearly all of Austen’s novels show evidence of Burney’s great influence on her as a writer. Cecilia, as she specifically mentions it in Northanger Abbey, particularly impressed her and a great number of parallels of style, characters, and plot can be found throughout her works. I do not suggest that Austen’s work is in any way derivative. My sense is that Cecilia inspired Austen; it seems to have stayed with her throughout her career as a model of authorship. I find Burney’s influence in every way positive, much like Austen’s assessment of the relationship among women authors; a kind of sisterly, almost collaborative effort wherein each woman has her own signature style, yet shares some common goals.

Pride of name, we find, and a desire to impose one’s will on others, lies at the root of this nonsense. At just the right time, Dr. Lyster told Mr. Delvile Sr. “all [he] wished to hear” and then “pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings” (emphasis in original 934). Essentially, Dr. Lyster finds the nail that seals his cleverly constructed coffin by “coupling [Mr. Delvile’s] name with a pawnbroker’s! … Thus the same passions, taking but different directions, do mischief and cure it alternately” (934). Burney’s choice to include this detail gives women a model for enacting change within an oppressive system. By understanding the system, and the “passions” of the people who control it, women can use the language of that system to shift those passions in “different directions” and toward their own goals.

The comic tone of this exchange deemphasizes the potential ramifications of a woman author taking on this role.

Burney uses a similar method with the amusing character of Lady Honoria, although her position as a woman makes her more vulnerable. As a result, to get away with such statements, she must be made that much more ridiculous. Burney first covers herself by letting her readers know that Lady Honoria should not be taken as a model for good behavior but as one who “had quick parts and high spirits, [but whose] mind was uncultivated [and] totally void of judgment or discretion” (464). However, Honoria reveals to Cecilia that she intentionally makes provocative, indecorous statements when she gleefully tells Cecilia, “… as soon as I have provoked the people, I always run away,” though she admits that she is “sometimes in a dreadful fright lest they should see [her] laugh” (508). Honoria goes so far as to brag to Cecilia about the power of such tactics. She torments her father but says, “‘what can he do to me, you know? he can

only storm a little, and swear a little … and perhaps order me to my own room; and ten to one but that happens to be the very thing that I want” (508). Cecilia is both surprised and amused to learn the ways Honoria uses language to manipulate situations and people. Honoria represents the feminized potential of Dr. Lyster’s argument for what is essentially rhetorical strategizing. Where Dr. Lyster might consider making use of people’s beliefs part of his moral “cure,” Honoria simply takes advantage of those around her. Nonetheless, their techniques show a similar awareness of “human nature” and social mores.

Lady Honoria is the sort of character who is just ridiculous enough to get away with making statements about society that can escape serious criticism since they can be laughed off at a moment’s notice.21 Such tactics might well stand for any number of times the women in this study make bold social statements and then retreat just in time behind a wall of moralizing—or laughter—in order to escape scrutiny. Much like the legal practice of making objectionable comments in court that must be stricken from the record—once heard by a jury, such statements cannot be unheard. Honoria proves that a woman’s mastery of language can become power, and Burney demonstrates through her that laugher can also convey such power to women writers and their readers.

In spite of its many comedic moments, the circumstances at the end of the novel present the stark reality of women’s vulnerability and undermine the potential for even linguistic power. Separated from her friends and husband, and bereft of her fortune,

21 In Laughing Feminism, Audrey Bilger identifies Lady Honoria as a trickster figure, who “is the polar opposite of an angel: she is outspoken; she makes people uncomfortable; she willfully violates codes of female behavior; and above all, she laughs … What all trickster figures share is a propensity to flaunt their unconventional behavior and a capacity to get the last laugh on their male opponents” (98). As I have argued, Bilger considers this figure, and her behavior, one form of the writer’s expression of women authors’ power.

Cecilia must attempt to navigate the physical world in a female body. Her mind and her fortune, her social position and her connections, even her highly touted virtues and perfections, become utterly useless to her. Society’s failure to give women the freedom they need to be recognized as whole beings in the world emerges as Cecilia stripped is down, layer by layer, to nothing. From the perspective of the socially constructed

“world,” Cecilia transforms into a cipher without these things—a kind of void. As Mr.

Hobson says earlier in the novel, “as to a lady, let her be worth never so much, she’s a mere nobody, as one may say, till she can get herself a husband, being she knows nothing of business” (877). Burney responds to these masculine constructs with reality, with “delineations of human nature,” some of which are unflattering (Northanger Abbey

31). Cecilia’s circumstances prove this seemingly absurd statement about women to be true in an almost macabre manner. Women do become nothings without husbands; their lack of knowledge forms traps all around them. Burney corrects this statement, though, by giving Cecilia a voice.

Rather than corroborating the assertion that Cecilia lacks an identity, Burney provides the reader a firsthand perspective of female experience. As such, the reader understands that being situated as a “nobody” can actually force one to madness. At the climax of the novel, while waiting to meet Delvile after their marriage, Cecilia finds herself alone and without friends in London. Though she is married, no one knows it, and her choice to give up her name in marriage has bereft her of her own fortune, making her dependent on Delvile for all financial requirements. Without anyone around for reference, Cecilia finds that her recently acquired married name is meaningless.

Most importantly, Cecilia realizes that the combination of events has trapped her in her

own female body, for she cannot move from one place to another without the

‘protection’ of a male body, name, or financial covering. Driven to the point of desperation, she roams the streets in the false belief that Delvile is dead. Eventually, she is driven to the point of madness for lack of friends and even for lack of a practical knowledge of what to do or where to go.22

Cecilia represents the multiple levels of social bondage women of the eighteenth century experienced. Her heroine’s position as an “heiress” actually serves to underscore the nature of the cage; one would think that having money and the ability to

“choose” among an abundance of suitors would make her life a fairy tale. Burney explores the way that language itself entrapped women within a seemingly invisible web of cultural expectations that could turn viciously upon those who broke its silent codes.

At birth, Cecilia is blessed with beauty and fortune, yet she is bound by the literal and figurative “will” of her uncle and his name—that most basic form of imposed masculine language. The cold reality of her life outside her uncle’s spoken and written “will” is no better than that of a common prostitute. She is, in fact, mistaken for “a woman of the town” when she is lost in London (897). Her true status may be best represented in this state, since nearly all she has—clothes, social and physical mobility, and friends— evaporates without the cover of protection that comes with her acquiescence with the

“will” of some man. Cecilia’s own will—the resolutions she attempts to make throughout the novel to maintain her sense of identity and control—comes between the “pleasure”

22 She is so “little used to travelling, and having never been out of England, she knew nothing of the route but by general knowledge of geography”; she knows nothing of “the impositions she should guard against, nor the various dangers to which she might be exposed, from total ignorance of the country through which she had to pass” (874).

of her uncle and the family and person of Delvile, who is the physical embodiment of his family. There is no room for Cecilia’s will; she must either be subject to her uncle’s will and forgo love, or she must be subject to the will of the Delviles and forgo the independence of her own fortune which, we have learned, is a very limited kind of independence for a woman at this time.

Through the female friendships in Cecilia, Burney develops a model for what a companionate marriage can be within the context of a balanced domestic life filled with intellectual stimulation and emotional fulfillment. She presents possibilities for her heroines to find companionship in both male and female relationships, though the difficulties of real life overpower this potential.

This is another way that Burney’s novels stand apart from the novels that follow hers; they are less optimistic in their outcomes. Evelina may end happily, but Burney’s novels grow progressively darker as the years go by. As early as her second novel,

Cecilia, the promise of companionship is a wish made impossible by present realities, the weight of which bear down so severely on the heroine that the traditional happiness found at the end of the romance—a genre founded on the comic model—feels more like a narrow escape from tragedy. The perils of Cecilia are far too heavy for a comedy; they are the stuff of epic tragedy. By the denouement, Cecilia has been made frantic by the oppressive forces surrounding her. The novel is dark, even angry; its end joyless.

Burney’s “thorough knowledge of human nature” narrows Cecilia’s possibilities for a fairytale ending (Northanger Abbey 31). No knight will appear to save her. No hardened hearts will soften and beg for forgiveness, showering her feet with tears. The hardened heart of Mr. Delvile Sr. is brought about through bribery; her “hero” from the masque

must be supported by others as he weeps through the worst of the crisis. The happiness Cecilia finds at the end resembles some portions of Johnson’s entries on friendship—it is defined as much by a lack of evil as it is from the presence of good.

Instead, Burney leaves her readers with a picture of the “imperfect” happiness that is Cecilia’s fate:

The upright mind of Cecilia, her purity, her virtue, and the moderation of her wishes, gave to her in the warm affection of Lady Delvile, and the unremitting fondness of Mortimer, all the happiness human life seems capable of receiving: —yet human it was, and as such imperfect! She knew that, at times, the whole family must murmur at her loss of fortune, and at times she murmured herself to be thus portionless, tho’ an HEIRESS. Rationally, however, she surveyed the world at large, and finding that of the few who had any happiness, there were none without some misery, she checked the rising sigh of repining mortality, and, grateful with general felicity, bore partial evil with chearfullest resignation. (940)

Cecilia’s happiness consists of her conviction of having an “upright mind” along with the

“warm affection” of a female friend and the “fondness” of a husband. She feels unhappy because the family she has married into still “murmer[s] at her loss of fortune,” as does she. The overall sentiment is one of an unfulfilled “scheme of happiness” in a home made up of companions who do not quite meet her needs. Although the first sentence claims their relationships provide “all the happiness human life seems capable of receiving,” the mention of murmuring about the loss of her fortune applies to the “family” without specifying any one member in particular. Burney’s most telling choice is the last word of the novel: “resignation.”

Burney set out to show how little choice Cecilia has in her life. She illustrates these possibilities through the language of sympathy and friendship. Burney tests out the ways women can (re)create their own destinies through Cecilia, but in the end she

only accepts them as possibilities, not realities. The novel remains far too conventional to propose any radical changes to these systems. Nonetheless, the questions cannot be unasked. They can no more be ignored than they can be unread by the mass audience who bought Burney’s novels. Thus Burney created a subversive model for fellow women writers to follow. The frequent mention of her name and books by sister novelists for decades to come attests to the great influence her voice had on them all.

CHAPTER 3 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP IN JANE AUSTEN’S COMMUNITIES OF WOMEN

Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. […] Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

—Jane Austen Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen read and admired Frances Burney’s novels, but the longer passage from which this epigram was taken suggests that she considered Burney a sister author as well. Austen’s comments about the implied connection between authors created through the “patronage” of one heroine by another can be set to use as a multi-tiered framework for the most important relationships in the lives of literate women in the eighteenth century: woman to woman, woman to community, author to reader(s), and author to author. In the following chapter, I look at Austen’s model of friendship—one that calls on women readers and writers to protect, defend, and support one another.

They did so as “injured bodies” in a world that was antagonistic to their presence. At the same time, they were bound together by rigid biological constructions of gender that intersected with slippery configurations of genre. Women’s attempts to step outside these constructs and to use their voices in the public realm met with “contemptuous censure” and “harsh epithets,” making communal “protection and regard” a most valuable commodity.

At every level of this framework, the eighteenth century’s changing conception of friendship takes center stage. Relationships form the core structure upon which women’s novels are built; and writers like Austen used this convention to challenge the

parameters of primary relationships. As a paradigm, women’s friendship served as a model for alternative, egalitarian values in a society that devalued women through the relationships that most defined them—their families and their marriages. In this chapter,

I explore the ways that Austen took the tool at her disposal—the developing genre of the courtship novel—to claim agency for women, women writers, and the communities of women connected to the novel. I examine the way Austen developed a uniquely female definition of friendship that included intimacy, sympathy, and an ethic of care.

Unlike some women writers of the long eighteenth century, Austen does not make the claim that women were superior to men. Instead, she takes women’s perceived status as an “inferior” class and turns it into an opportunity to reverse the cultural dynamic of dominance and submission for the benefit of all. Austen’s goal in advancing these values is to offer an alternative to the failures of patriarchal models.

Every tale of courtship, told from a woman’s point of view, and rooted in the daily experience of women, remains entrenched in the minutiae of estates, entails, and the monetary reality of every marriage in the texts. No matter how ‘romantic’ the world of an

Austen novel may seem, readers cannot escape these structures.

Austen’s models of women’s friendship explore the potential for egalitarian values to replace these outdated patriarchal systems, which caused suffering to both men and women. Austen’s version of female friendship can also offer an alternative model of community precisely because it operates simultaneously inside and outside of the existing power structure. In fact, the important distinctions she makes in her delineations of false friendships underscore the ways that some women reinforce patriarchal values—those of power and property over relationships and people—rather

than supporting this alternative model. For this reason, her definitions of false, absent, or lost friendships are just as necessary as those of positive relational dynamics. Austen foregrounds egalitarian women’s friendships to provide women with the means to claim individual agency. Her novels focus on women who “find themselves” on their journey toward marriage, while placing a relatively small emphasis on the end result of the marriage itself. Instead, she emphasizes the manner through which a positive marriage can resituate a woman in a community that includes egalitarian relationships—those that include intimacy, sympathy, and care—in a circle of supportive women.

While the women’s communities in Austen’s novels begin with individual relationships, they expand outward to include networks of family connections and friends, wherein the values established in individual friendships prove their worth in the social fabric of women’s lives. I have called women’s friendships and, by extension, women’s communities, egalitarian because they tend to expand more fluidly across class boundaries. However, I do not suggest that Austen makes any groundbreaking progressive social statements with her novels. I only suggest that when compared to the relationships between men and women, Austen explores and develops relationships between women established across class barriers because she bases them upon the common ground of their lived experiences as women. These vertical relationships evolve within the context of a community of women and, as such, both rely upon and reinforce the values of sympathy and care on a greater scale. Essentially, they work successfully because those who take part in them do so as whole persons rather than as disembodied commodities. Women can participate in this community when they

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choose to act upon their thoughts and emotions rather than allow themselves to be acted upon.

Since Austen’s heroines learn about themselves in the context of community, their core character values can also be tried there. Their roles in this community do not resemble the roles they take in the accepted social norms of patriarchal structures, and

Austen takes great care to contrast these values and their results on both individuals and communities. Through interaction with women who qualify as their inferiors,

Austen’s heroines learn through experience, failure, and the observation of others what it means to be a sympathetic member of a women’s community. In some cases, this means choosing to treat a woman of a different class as an equal; in others, it means treating a woman of unequal intellect with sympathetic understanding. Whichever form they take, however, these relationships serve as reminders that women’s communities are built upon the foundation of connectedness that aspire toward equality; at their best, positive women’s communities strive to create alternatives to patriarchal structures.

Failures of Patriarchy—Women and the Estate

Austen begins every novel with a brilliantly constructed sketch of the damage that patriarchal systems of inheritance, property ownership, and entails have wrought upon the relationships of the families and friendships of those within their influence. Such introductions serve to set up the first key dynamic of the whole. While

Austen’s narratives center on women and focus on their various relationships, all of the narratives exist within the iron framework of social, cultural and monetary systems that

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influence everyone connected to them. She never allows readers to forget where women stand in relationship to the world around them. 23

Sense and Sensibility opens on an estate that at first seems to be indistinguishable from the family to which it belongs: “The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where for many generations, they had lived in [a] respectable a manner” (3). On the death of the current, childless owner of the estate, however, this seamless picture of land, family, fortune, and character fractures into the cold reality of human foibles. When the Dashwood girls’ father dies, the narrative quickly devolves into a description of the cold calculations inspired by the reading of wills, the ownership of houses and dishware, and the handing out of fortunes. The Dashwood women are quite literally shoved out of their home within pages of the beginning of the novel by their half-brother, who has no need of it.

Similarly, Pride and Prejudice’s famous opening line lampoons succinctly the

“universally acknowledged” social norm of fortune-hunting women a few pages before explaining the uncomfortable situation of the five Bennet sisters—a harsh reality brought about by the entail of their father’s property (3). Anxious mothers and scheming daughters may well have been on the lookout for “a single man in possession of a good

23 For example, most of her novels include characters who experience the effects of the laws of coverture, which essentially absorbed a woman’s person-hood into that of her husband. In 1820, in A treatise on the law of property arising from the relation between husband and wife, R.S. Donnison Roper reveals much about social attitudes toward women as they are expressed in practical matters of the law. From a chapter titled “Disabilities of Coverture, and Exceptions to Them” Roper explains that coverture serves to both “prevent … the regard the wife is supposed to entertain for her husband, and his influence over her, from stripping her of all her property” and “to exempt the husband from her acts and engagements to which he was not privy and consenting” (97). Roper argues that it is for these noble purposes coverture renders “the sole actions of a married woman … void” (98).

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fortune,” but there were also numerous fortuneless single men on the prowl for eligible young ladies with substantial dowries (3). These men appear in the pages of every

Austen novel.24 Mansfield Park’s bleak beginning presents a layered narrative of poverty, marital prostitution, and the desperation of young women who live at the mercy of those who have—or do not have—property and wealth. Fanny Price’s mother, who married for love, ends up poor and miserable while Fanny’s aunt Bertram marries well and lives a life of laudanum-laced indolence. Fortune seems fickle, and every novel opens upon a picture of women whose lives depend in great part upon the financial situation of the men in their lives. The only limited degree of control women held was in the power of refusal of a marriage proposal. They could not, however, make marriageable men materialize or induce them to propose. Fate settled fortunes randomly and women had no control over its mechanisms.

Through this shorthand backdrop of land, estates, and property, Austen shows how the eighteenth-century patriarchal system of entails failed both women and society.

I do not mean to suggest that Austen’s novels represent any sort of systematic refutation of the laws or systems of inheritance, entails, or property ownership. Instead, I believe that Austen’s emphasis on these matters underscores the way they negatively impacted relationships and morality. She paid special attention to the limitations and pain these systems created in the lives of women.

24 To list them briefly: In Northanger Abbey—both John Thorpe and Captain Tilney seek to increase their fortunes through marriage; in Sense and Sensibility, John Willoughby breaks Marianne’s heart by jilting her to marry a woman of substantially larger fortune; in Pride and Prejudice, George Wickham involves himself with three different women in pursuit of a mercenary marriage; in Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford’s initial intention at Mansfield is to survey the Bertram girls as potential marriage partners since they have substantial dowries; in Persuasion, Mr. Elliot is found out to have already married for money once and is in the midst of ingratiating himself with Sir Walter in order to get his hands on some of the family money sooner. Scoundrels all.

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To begin, these systems simultaneously relied upon and commodified women in order to maintain both succession and power. Yet, at the same time, they produced a great number of superfluous women, who then became dependent upon the goodwill of their fathers and brothers.25 This socio-economic situation left many women in the financial position of either becoming prey to fortune hunting men, or becoming fortune hunters themselves. Both male and female characters that represent the natural results of this system populate all of Austen’s novels. One vivid visual example of this reality appears in the character of Willoughby, who first appears in Sense and Sensibility quite literally as a hunter “carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him” (50). He openly courts Marianne throughout the first half of the novel, but then disappears and immediately engages himself to a woman “in possession of a large fortune” the very day his aunt threatens to disinherit him. In Northanger Abbey, Isabella Thorpe and her brother scour the rooms of Bath for wealthy partners. In Pride and Prejudice, while Miss

Bingley’s failed attempts at wooing Mr. Darcy through endless compliments amuse the reader, the less obvious Mr. Wickham, with “views solely and hatefully mercenary,” makes attempts at two women of fortune while flirting with Elizabeth Bennet, because he had either “been deceived with regard to her fortune” or was merely “gratifying his vanity” (229). In every case but Miss Bingley’s, the object of these pursuits learns of the true intentions of his or her pursuer through the test of monetary gain.26 When

25 Brian McCrea has also documented a “demographic crisis of 1650-1740 [which] greatly complicated ‘the descent of property and seats from generation to generation’ … and cases in which ‘a failure in the male line’ threatened patrilinear descent’ (16). This shortage of male heirs created a number of superfluous women whose maintenance—or basic living expenses—depended upon their attachment to one of this shrinking number. If they could not marry, their options were extremely limited.

26 In Miss Bingley’s case, Darcy is a lost cause from the beginning. As he has never been interested in her, her pursuit of him is a rather pointless one.

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confronted with the idea of a meagre fortune, the pursuer’s affections grow cold.

Willoughby, Mr. and Miss Thorpe, and Mr. Wickham all quickly decamp in favor of wealthier partners once they realize their mistakes.

These sentiments suggest that the system of male inheritance and entails corrupts the virtues of both sexes, rendering their best qualities irrelevant and meaningless, while encouraging vice and magnifying the worst qualities of everyone— greed, vanity, and ignorance. It turns women against one another in their fight for the attention of men while fostering an environment where false appearances triumph over sincerity. Most of all, it promotes alienation among people—a hyper-vigilance of the self that leaves little room for the observation of the needs of others.

Austen responds to this vast social problem by taking the dominant/submissive structure of patriarchal relationships between men and women—whether familial or marital—and showing an alternative kind of relationship through individual female friendships. Female friendship is a model of relationships and communities—it is a model for human values. Austen represents positive female communities as non- hierarchical, non-patriarchal entities that reconstitute current structures. Women’s novels tell a story from women’s perspectives in order to realign these values—not to establish women’s values as superior.27 She sets these female friendships within a

27 In The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel, Eve Tavor Bannet argues that many women writers of the long eighteenth century who shared a set of Enlightenment feminist goals could be delineated further as either “Matriarchs” or “Egalitarians.” She elucidates this concept by describing a “complex discursive world where diverse feminist and patriarchal agendas were articulated upon one another and where different voices were both joined and divided by the ‘same’ … words … ideals … and representations, often attaching different meanings to the same lexes” (5). Nonetheless, Bannet finds a division between the approaches to change that Matriarchs and Egalitarians took in their writings. Egalitarians and Matriarchs also held fundamentally different underlying beliefs about the equality of men and women. Matriarchs, according to Bannet, believed women were superior to men. As a result, they “taught ladies how to obtain and deploy their ascendancy over men, and over their inferiors, which they thought were the ladies’ due” (3). Egalitarians instead argued for equality between the sexes

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broader network of female relationships that likewise function like a web, creating a community of women who, through a series of shared values, often become equals regardless of their actual rank or class. However, Austen is too practical to ignore class.

She merely presents possibilities—she focuses on the things women are capable of achieving if they work together in spite of the ways that men try to control their lives, their fortunes, their emotions, and their bodies. Austen suggests a version of what

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman instructed them a few years earlier, that by reforming themselves they can reform their communities (49). Perhaps from that vantage point, they might then take on the “world.”

Defining Women’s Friendships

The alternative values and relationships Austen wishes to encourage are presented positively in her earlier novels, specifically in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, through the relationships of two pairs of sisters. Austen represents women’s friendships as relationships marked by intimacy, sympathy, and a distinctly female ethic of care. She also develops two different types of relationships, each of which has either positive or negative capabilities. The first type of relationship is that of a teacher and a student. In this case, a woman can take on the positive attributes of a mentor, teaching her friend through suggestion and example the proper way to respond in social situations and even passing on information to her about the world that will protect her from harm. The woman in the position of student works through the process

and “sought to level hierarchies both in the family and in the state” (3). Bannet does not oversimplify these categories by making them a simple binary opposition; for instance, she places Charlotte Smith among the ranks of Egalitarians, but she finds an authors like Jane Austen, or “the later Burney,” taking a much more complicated middle ground where “they constructed their positions, debated the extremes, or negotiated between them” (3, 10).

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of individuation in the course of the novel. The negative potential inherent in this type of friend, particularly in Austen’s novels, can be seen in negligent mothers,28 whose failures create a need for the intervention of a caring and wise friend to operate in this capacity. The second type of friend present in Austen’s novels is a companion. In this case, the women stand on equal footing and the relationship serves both parties as they develop side by side toward their personal goals. Generally, based on the structure of the novel, the reader follows only one of the characters—the heroine—through the process of development and growth. The secondary friend serves in a supporting role to show the nature and function of women’s friendship and community in the life of the heroine. The negative component of the companion role can be found in the false friend, who enters the novel in the guise of a true friend but turns out to be duplicitous and operating in her own self-interest. Since the qualities of true female friendship are intimacy, sympathy, and selfless care; the false friend is inevitably found out by her use of intimacy for selfish gain, her lack of sympathy, and her complicity in the masculine tendency to value hierarchy rather than the female ethic of care.

Austen’s first two novels codify the qualities of female friendship by presenting two sisters as the primary characters, and placing them within a larger community of women. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Marianne, though they are in some ways co-heroines, have a teacher-student relationship. Elinor takes on the role of teacher as a result of the failures of her well-meaning but ineffective mother. Many readers, a

28 The only novel in which this is not true is Northanger Abbey. Catherine Moreland’s mother is kind and sensible. Her only flaw might be considered an inability to comprehend fully the social problems Catherine will encounter. Generally, however, her advice is sound and she has raised an unpretentious, if slightly naïve, young lady. Eleanor Tilney’s mother has died before the beginning of the novel. Nonetheless, her character is spoken of in a positive manner and she seems to have passed on to Eleanor sense and everything she needed to have good values.

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number of whom are very vocal members of the Jane Austen Society, have read this in a negative light, suggesting that Austen paints Elinor as an unfeeling know-it-all who is constantly lecturing Marianne to reform her childish outbursts of feeling. Other readings suggest that Elinor’s efforts to tame Marianne’s proclivities toward Romantic raptures represents a disapproval of the Romantic Movement as a whole. However, discussions of Austen’s engagement with any philosophical or literary movement must allow for the inclusion of the cultural context of women’s financial and material realities. The novel foregrounds this context by placing the sisters in similar circumstances but contrasting their responses. Philosophical ideals do not cease to matter, but Austen grounds them in female relationships. She works within a Johnsonian framework of dichotomies to draw out a more complex understanding of both. The novel escapes the oversimplification of some of the other conduct novels of her day by working out its problems within the relationship between the two women—where care, love, concern, and sympathy matter.29 Elinor’s steady, compassionate advice and care for her sister signifies more than harsh logic working upon delicate sensibility; she acts and speaks as a loving mentor and friend. Elinor represents the protective mechanism of women’s friendship and women’s community within harsh worldly realities.

In Pride and Prejudice, any remnants of an instructive female voice have been relocated within the heroine’s growing consciousness and in the occasional voice of reason from a female friend, or even the hero. All of these relationships, however,

29 For instance, Austen considered Mary Brunton’s Self Control, which Judy Stove believes to be one of Austen’s many influences in her composition of Sense and Sensibility, to be lacking in realism (Stove 4). Stove calls Brunton’s stilted handling of the role of morality in dealing with the passions a kind of “self- defeating moral instruction” (4).

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Austen reconfigures as egalitarian. Most importantly, the female friendships that are in place before the developing courtship provide a model for it through their focus on egalitarian companionship, affection, and emotional support.30 Pride and Prejudice’s

Jane and Elizabeth Bennet stand on equal footing. Elizabeth, though, reaches the ultimate point of individuation on her own. Although Austen indicates that Elizabeth’s journey to it takes place alongside her sister, she does not do so through Jane’s tutelage. Elizabeth does admire some of Jane’s qualities and attempts to emulate them, but she does so as part of an overall effort to become a better person. She does not wish to become more like Jane; her goal in the novel is to become more like herself.

Elizabeth must locate an authentic self—one that she can respect, value, and live with.

She values her sister as a companion with whom she can converse, share secrets, problem solve, and share affection and emotional intimacy. Pride and Prejudice displays the emotional, psychological, intellectual support strong female friends provide for one another. The variety of women who do not fit the criteria for friendship only serve to underscore its value; they live in a home with three obnoxious sisters and a shrill, hypochondriac mother. Jane and Elizabeth’s friendship is rare; no other friend or sister pair in the novel share their affectionate intimacy or their ability to support one another in the situations into which they are thrown. Austen also points out the rarity of their values, virtues, and personalities through the comments of their father and the men who love them.

30 While the heroine spends much of the novel in the company of her female friends and companions, her developing relationship with the hero demonstrates by its conclusion the ability of both parties to learn from one another.

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As Burney does in Cecilia, in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and

Prejudice, Austen emphasizes the value of intimacy as it is nurtured through the sisters’ confidences in one another. By sharing their thoughts and emotions, they reveal parts of themselves unavailable to any other characters in the novels. In our current culture of oversharing, this may seem like a minor point, but in the context of a culture that highly valued discretion and discouraged speaking of emotions, the sharing of “secrets” was considered a key measure of the degree of friendship. For Elinor and Marianne, this sharing of trust and intimacy, which represents one of the most comforting aspects of female friendship, takes a long time to develop, since Marianne has only confided her feelings to her mother. Elinor’s repeated entreaties to her mother about Marianne’s secrecy concerning Willoughby show that she recognizes her mother’s failure to assume her proper role. A responsible mother—one assured of her daughter’s willingness to comply—would insist that Marianne confide in her. Had she done so, she could then have taken on the next proper duty of a mother, teacher, and mentor—that of guiding and protecting Marianne from a predatory man. Only after Marianne realizes how much her literal and figurative lack of confidence in her sister has hurt her does she let down her guard and reveal the true state of her affair with Willoughby:

Elinor drew near, but without saying a word; and seating herself on the bed, took her hand, kissed her affectionately several times, and then gave way to a burst of tears, which at first was scarcely less violent than Marianne's. The latter, though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behaviour, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor's hands (207-8).

This communication marks a turning point in Marianne’s developing awareness of herself, and a parallel increase in intimacy between the sisters. Elinor’s ability to be a true friend to Marianne begins when their intimacy increases.

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For Elizabeth and Jane, such intimate communication marks their relationship from the start. They have always set themselves apart from the rest of the family by their unique ability to speak and act as a unit. This is most in evidence during the crisis of their younger sister Lydia’s elopement. Both women discuss the scandal with many others in the house, yet they do so primarily as a way of “handling” the situation. When they are alone together, though, they confide in and console one another in a way that none of the others can or will. Their intimate, collaborative style of communication allows them to make sense of the facts and determine how best to help those around them. After Lydia’s elopement is discovered, Elizabeth returns after an extended absence to find Jane exhausted from dealing with a house in tumult. Together they quickly rebalance their usual seamless relational presence of knowing and doing. First, they restore the imbalance of intimate knowledge: “In the afternoon the two elder Miss

Bennets were able to be for half an hour by themselves; and Elizabeth instantly availed herself of the opportunity of making many enquiries … ‘But tell me all and everything about it which I have not already heard. Give me farther particulars’" (319). Her response to Jane’s recitation shows her intimate understanding of Jane, for from these

“particulars” she intuits Jane’s emotional and mental state: “Your attendance upon

[Mother] has been too much for you. You do not look well. Oh that I had been with you! -

- you have had every care and anxiety upon yourself alone” (322). Although they have three other sisters and a mother, no such confidence, trust, or communication exists.

In one circumstance Austen creates a breakdown of communication between

Jane and Elizabeth—not of anger or discord—but a carefully crafted silence made up of circumstance and fueled by the very love of which their friendship is made. Austen

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stages these events to occur while the sisters are separated by distance, experiencing events and emotions apart, and making their decisions about courses of action without the benefit of consultation with one another. As part of her growing intimacy with Darcy,

Elizabeth learns—and chooses to conceal—a piece of information that would hurt Jane to know. During this time, she also wrestles with a complex set of emotions that she feels she must conceal from everyone—even Jane. Her dearest friend and sister has no idea that Elizabeth even likes (much less loves) Darcy until they are engaged to be married. For perhaps the first time in her life, Jane is not privy to everything Elizabeth knows and feels. Austen explains the former omission as an act of love. However, the latter serves as a key component in Austen’s marked attention to the importance of the development of the individual identity of the heroine. When Elizabeth comes home,

Jane’s gentle reproof tells much about their usual mode of open communication with one another: “But, Lizzy, you have been very sly, very reserved with me. How little did you tell me of what passed at Pemberley and Lambton! I owe all that I know of it to another, not to you” (415). Naturally, their conference to catch up on all the details lasts

“half the night,” for Elizabeth can now tell Jane

… the motives of her secrecy. She had been unwilling to mention Bingley; and the unsettled state of her own feelings had made her equally avoid the name of [Darcy]. But now she would no longer conceal from her his share in Lydia's marriage. All was acknowledged, and half the night spent in conversation. (415)

Once Lizzie explains this to Jane, the balance in their relationship is restored.

Elizabeth’s hesitancy to name Bingley simply reflected her desire to shield Jane from pain, for she had no reason at the time to believe that Bingley would return and therefore no cause to create any more distress. Her omission of Darcy reflects far more

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complex internal workings. Her final explanation to Jane that her hesitancy had to do with the “unsettled state of her own feelings” contains a pointed reference to her denouement as an individual prior to this scene (415). Up to that point in her life, this settling of thoughts and feelings into order might have taken place in a long discussion with Jane. Elizabeth expresses her awareness of this change of situation as they talk it through: “I was very uncomfortable. I may say unhappy. And with no one to speak to of what I felt, no Jane to comfort me and say that I had not been so very weak and vain and nonsensical as I knew I had! Oh! how I wanted you!” (250). In the earlier scene, when Elizabeth’s character is tested, she “weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality,” working her way through the seeds of the growth that find their fruition in her most important moment of self recognition—the moment when she declares “till this moment I never knew myself” (230). Her intimate friendship with Jane does not preclude this important moment of individual development; instead, it supplements and reaffirms it. Elizabeth returns to Jane and celebrates her newfound self, including the thoughts and feelings she experienced that were part of this discovery. This return to friendship reestablishes the importance of their shared bond.

Women’s Sympathetic Friendship

Jane and Elizabeth’s intimacy both creates and is nourished by sympathy, which is the most important characteristic of positive female friendships. In his Dictionary,

Johnson defines sympathy as “fellow-feeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affection of another” and says that to sympathize is “to feel with another; to feel in consequence of what another feels; to feel mutually” (1:758). Austen’s novels expand this quality outward to male/female relationships, but she first explores the complexity of sympathetic emotions within female relationships by telling her stories

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from a woman’s perspective. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, the relationships between female friends test the boundaries of self and other far more than the courtship pairings. Through this built-in emphasis on women’s relationships, Austen refines a definition of sympathy that both responds to and distinguishes itself from the contemporary masculine models, particularly those of David Hume and, to a lesser degree, Adam Smith. In her response, Austen constructs an alternative model of sympathy based on values associated with women, something modern feminists refer to as an ethic of care. In Austen, these values have recognizable behavioral markers and are directly associated with character development. Her long eighteenth century version of a feminist ethic of care represents an advanced articulation of egalitarian ethics—one that sought to value relationships built upon character above those based on inheritance, hierarchies, and property.

In Austen’s novels, fellow-feeling and shared emotion, such as that described between Jane and Elizabeth, express themselves through embodied action. Austen concurs with Johnson’s broad definition of “fellow feeling,” or the quality of being

“affected” emotionally by the emotions of another (1:758). However, Austen refines her definition beyond a vague concept of emotional response. She considers sympathy to include a dimension of shared feeling that requires a degree of selfless action—one must balance out one’s own emotions in order to enter into and share the emotions of others. Austen’s sympathy expands beyond the self to include those in different circumstances, thereby seeking to nourish egalitarian values in relationships.

In Sense and Sensibility, Austen shows this sympathy in action through contrast.

Elinor displays selfless sympathy throughout the novel. Even when Elinor knows

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Marianne’s behavior has been wrong, she still has an acute awareness of “her sister's affliction … and she [thinks] with the tenderest compassion of that violent sorrow”

Marianne experiences (90). In comparison, Marianne starts out with the ability to express love for her sister but is often unable to set aside her own emotional needs and act upon it. Part of Marianne’s development through the novel involves learning how to be more truly sympathetic. Only after experiencing pain and embarrassment does she learn to look outside of herself and consider the perspective of others.

In the previous chapter, I discussed Hume’s description of sympathy in his

Treatise of Human Nature. He considers the “propensity we have to sympathize with others …remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences” precisely because it operates as we see in Elinor, who “receive[s] by communication [Marianne’s] inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to [her] own”

(238). Hume explains that the emotions of one person could be presented as an “idea” to another, and then “converted into an impression, [which] acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and then produce an equal emotion” in the other (239). To understand Hume’s explanation, we must pair it with his earlier explanation of the origin of ideas and impressions:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions: and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. (17)

In this context, we understand that sympathy, though mediated, nonetheless reproduces the original emotion or passion felt by its object. If some of the potential

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impressions that can enter the mind to form ideas are “sensations, passions, and emotions,” then the single function of the formation of an idea becomes doubled in the act of sympathy. First the “external signs” of the emotions of another are known as

“ideas” because they are not immediately accessible; then “the idea is converted into an impression,” which is stronger and closer to the self. This reversal of experience causes the influx of emotion to enter the viewer with “a degree of force and vivacity” that equals the original passion of the person with whom the viewer is sympathizing. Most intriguingly, this new emotion “becomes the very emotion itself, and then produce[s] an equal emotion” that transfers from the object to the viewer. Perhaps the powerful reproduction of emotion explains Hume’s choice of the phrase “infused with sympathy.”

Hume’s explanation of sympathy establishes an epistemology of emotion, conveying equal legitimacy upon the human mechanisms of knowing and feeling.

Austen uses Hume’s theory of our inborn capacity for sympathy to build bonds of friendship between women.31 When two women understand each another, the thoughts and feelings of the other are so well known that they respond instinctively and enter into each other’s emotions as quickly as they do their own. In one scene in Pride and

Prejudice, when Darcy and Bingley appear unexpectedly before several of the difficulties of the plot have been resolved, Austen blends Jane and Elizabeth’s reactions and emotions together, even at the sentence level:

31 I do not argue that Austen makes any pointed reference to Hume in her definition of sympathy, only that her use of sympathy is in accordance with his definitions. Austen mentions Hume once in Northanger Abbey in a rather significant scene wherein the main characters are discussing “historians” and authors. Eleanor Tilney says, “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” (110) From this we can safely deduce that she read and approved of Hume’s style of writing.

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Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. She knew but little of [Darcy and Elizabeth’s] meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt for the awkwardness which must attend her sister, in seeing him almost for the first time after receiving his explanatory letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves. (369)

In spite of Jane’s limited knowledge of what has passed between Elizabeth and Darcy, she can deduce her sister’s feelings with a single look. And in the same moment—even within the same sentence—Austen shows the passage of shared emotion and unselfish

“concern” between them; each feels sympathy for the other in spite of her own troubled feelings.

The act of observation in this scene signals another important quality of sympathy between female friends, one I have termed watchfulness. This sharp perception manifests itself in marked contrast from the male gaze. To call it a female gaze would still align it, albeit through opposition, with the male gaze and its attendant power dynamics.32 Watchfulness in Austen’s novels encompasses the full range of

Hume’s sympathy as that kind of “perception” that can “produce an equal emotion” in the observer (239). Likewise, rather than maintaining the status of a noun, which attaching the adjective “female” gives the term—the female gaze—I prefer to maintain the active quality of watching, and to align it with a more gender-neutral and caring body of associations. I wish to align it with a version of a feminist ethics of care.

32 In Chapter 2 I discussed the way Cecilia Beverley reversed the power of the male gaze by first ignoring it and then returning it. I argued that Burney created a degree of power by allowing Cecilia to engage in an internal monologue about the scene around her, thereby granting the socially silent Cecilia a narrative voice. My description here of the “gaze” in Sense and Sensibility takes on the new dimension of being a shared experience between women—a sympathetic and active watchfulness. The common ground, however, might be seen in Austen’s narrating of the female perspective and the subsequent agency to be found in acting upon a newfound subjectivity.

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Contemporary feminist theory’s ethics of care “is rooted in the fundamental conviction that human life is essentially interdependent” (Walters 77). In the ethical aspect of the argument, critics are most interested in the difference between

men’s emphasis on separation and autonomy [which] leads them to develop a style of moral reasoning that stresses justice, fairness, and rights. In contrast, women’s emphasis on connections and relationships leads them to develop a style of moral reasoning that stresses the wants, needs, and interests of particular people. (Tong 164) 33

Many proponents of this theory base their arguments on an essentialist model; however, I focus here on the few who argue for a theory that understands a “feminine” virtue of care as one culturally associated with women, not one toward which women have a biologically determined tendency.

When applied, this ethic can utilize care-based values to offset—without erasing—the rationalist-based concept of justice that has its roots in patriarchal structures. Eighteenth-century women writers sought to make use of these constructions by taking the authority provided by the public media of the page and rewriting women’s values as human values. In doing so, they challenged the very assumption that the values were gender-specific. As they sought to bring higher social value to the qualities attributed to women—morality, care, and sympathy—they

33 Like most contemporary feminist theories, critics hold contrasting visions of its underlying structure. Many proponents of the feminist ethic of care have been criticized and subsequently dismissed for making an essentialist argument based on the idea that women’s “distinctly feminine practices such as mothering and physical or emotional caring for others” give them access to this needed, corrective ethic (73). In reality some—but not all—proponents of this theory ascribe to this foundational concept. However, a non-essentialist foundation does not necessarily equal a morality based solely on rationality to the exclusion of relational, care-based values. These values have been construed as feminine, but only as a result of cultural constructions and the social restrictions that resulted from them. For example, the very notion that women are better suited to care for children is actually a result of the social restriction placed on women by the concept of public and private spheres; society has limited women to the private sphere of the home and to the care of children for hundreds of years in nearly every culture. Therefore a cultural construct combined with social restrictions inform what people conceive to be a natural phenomenon.

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resituated them as socially relevant values. In this light, their revised vision of these values can be viewed as a feminist project.

Sympathetic watchfulness revises the male gaze’s need for ownership and dominance. When a sympathetic female friend watches her sister or companion, she watches protectively but not possessively; her concern is for safety and health. James

Walters considers feminist care the “foundation of ethical response,” which “displac[es] the motive to seek personal gain” (78). Because a female friend knows the heart and emotions of her companion in the same way that she knows herself, she seeks to assist her in her needs, prevent any difficulties, and guard her from any embarrassments. She does not present herself as a rival. The minute she does any of these things, she ceases to be a true friend. Sympathy motivates her acute watchfulness.

This watchfulness can represent concern in a broach range of circumstances— from social difficulties to emotional health to physical danger. Elinor’s night of watching over Marianne when she nearly dies serves as the most dramatic and literal example of sympathetic watchfulness that manifests itself in the acute attentiveness to every motion of its object:

About noon, however, she began -- but with a caution a dread of disappointment, which for some time kept her silent, even to her friend -- to fancy, to hope she could perceive a slight amendment in her sister's pulse; -- she waited, watched, and examined it again and again; -- … she bent over her sister to watch -- she hardly knew for what. Half an hour passed away, and the favourable symptom yet blessed her. Others even arose to confirm it. Her breath, her skin, her lips, all flattered Elinor with signs of amendment, and Marianne fixed her eyes on her with a rational though languid gaze. (355)

Naturally, this type of event calls for close watching. The focus here is on the physical body, the pulse, and the breath. Elinor’s entire being seems directed toward her sister’s

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health and recovery. When Marianne finally returns her gaze, the “reward” is rationality, something Elinor already has. Her watching has been selfless, and her joy in

Marianne’s recovery is as much for others as it is for herself.

However, watchfulness goes beyond physical health. Elinor keeps an equally concerned eye on Marianne when they are in public, looking for physical signs that betray emotions, and for social missteps that might lead her into every type of danger.

Although she certainly wishes to avoid being embarrassed by Marianne in company, her primary motive is a concern for Marianne’s well-being. When they spot Willoughby in town at a private ball, she is first to “perceive” him, and she “caught his eye” before

Marianne knows he is there (200). From that moment, she is on alert: “Elinor turned involuntarily to Marianne, to see whether it could be unobserved by her” (200). As in other instances, Elinor’s eyes direct her emotions and actions to preserve the emotions of her sister, to whom she is acutely attuned.

Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, after her great disappointment with Mr. Bingley, a look at the women surrounding Jane Bennet demonstrates the active elements of sympathetic watchfulness. Austen tells the reader that, although Jane says nothing about Bingley since his departure from the neighborhood, she has “not been able to hear of his coming without changing colour” (367). Yet, when her mother hears news of his coming, she fails to consider the possibility of Jane’s pain or embarrassment, nor does she notice any signs of it. Instead, she rattles on for days about Bingley with her equally oblivious sister.

To confirm Jane’s true feelings about her mother’s lack of awareness, she confides to Elizabeth at one point that she "could see him with perfect indifference; but I

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can hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually talked of. My mother means well; but she does not know -- no one can know -- how much I suffer from what she says” (369). In contrast, Elizabeth’s keen watchfulness of her sister shows her sympathetic awareness of Jane’s emotional state. As Jane notes,

‘I saw you look at me to-day, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of the present report; and I know I appeared distressed … I do assure you, that the news does not affect me either with pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing -- that he comes alone; because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people's remarks.’ (367)

In fact, since Jane denies some of her own “pleasure” or “distress” in seeing Bingley, which she contradicts moments later with her actions, Elizabeth proves at times to have a better sense of Jane’s feelings than Jane has herself. She shows a keen perception into her sister’s feelings: “In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be her feelings, in the expectation of his arrival, Elizabeth could easily perceive that her spirits were affected by it. They were more disturbed, more unequal, than she had often seen them” (367). In the case where a friendship is more a companionship than a mentorship, the partners share a degree of insight that provides additional help in the process of self-revelation. Here, Jane seems disconnected from her own emotional state and Elizabeth’s insights, though often conveyed in the form of gentle teasing, help

Jane understand her own feelings. Elizabeth’s careful observations and unceasing concern for Jane allows her the great insight needed to serve her in this way. As the novel proves, this kind of relationship between women aids in the mental and emotional development of both.

Austen’s novels contain one other version of watchfulness that manifests itself in a protective instinct against much harsher physical and emotional dangers. Much like

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Austen’s treatment of property and financial matters, these moments tend toward blunt practicality. She encourages women to practice solidarity in an antagonistic climate as a protective mechanism. Throughout the novels, her tone varies from dark humor to satire to pathos. The underlying theme, though, is that women must learn how to protect themselves in a world where false moves have dire consequences for unprotected women. In Love and Freindship [sic] (1790),34 this idea plays out as a macabre spoof on false sensibility. The protagonist Sophia, who is a prototype for Marianne, exhorts her

“beloved Laura” with deliciously silly, dramatic flair,

My beloved Laura (said she to me a few Hours before she died) take warning from my unhappy End and avoid the imprudent conduct which had occasioned it... Beware of fainting-fits … Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreable yet beleive me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution... My fate will teach you this... I die a Martyr to my greif for the loss of Augustus… One fatal swoon has cost me my Life… Beware of swoons Dear Laura ... A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint. (132-33)

Sophia’s advice takes on a kind of somber truth in Marianne’s case when her inner need to create drama leads her to a self-induced illness that nearly kills her. In Sophia’s dialogue, Austen captures the morbid delight some take in creating wild sensations where they do not exist. With Marianne, Austen tones it down but still makes the point that belaboring grief and making oneself a “Martyr” to it, “however refreshing and agreeable,” can turn dangerous to a woman in the real world. Before Marianne arrives at this state, Elinor stresses the importance of emotional balance as a means of

34 Most Austen scholars have lovingly maintained her youthful misspellings in both the title (Love and Freindship) and text of published editions of this work. Therefore, I feel confident in following their lead in my references to both the title and in my citations of its text.

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sustaining Marianne’s physical and mental health; she emphasizes further that

Marianne alone can control her emotions. In both texts, Austen implies that women

“chuse” to either “run mad” or “faint”; in doing so, they take an active role in the outcome of their lives (133).

Austen connects these emotional choices with physical realities. She hints at this idea in a conversation between Elinor and Colonel Brandon as they dispute the relative merits of a young woman having “a better acquaintance with the world” or being kept in complete ignorance of it (66). Although they discuss Marianne’s youthful and romantic notions of first attachments, the subtext involves the broader imaginings of both Elinor and Colonel Brandon of potential dangers to Marianne. The conversation reaches into the lives of the readers when Austen allows it to take a philosophical bent. While

Brandon defends the “amiable … prejudices of a young mind,” Elinor sees both its flaws and its dangers—

There are inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne's, which all the charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her greatest possible advantage. (66)

In truth, they probably imagine similar outcomes, for when Brandon later reveals the story of the disgraced Eliza whose same “ignorance of the world” left her pregnant and dying, Elinor shows little surprise at the circumstance (66). Brandon has from the beginning of his acquaintance with Marianne, considered her very like the first ‘Eliza,’ and seen “a very strong resemblance between them, as well in mind as person -- the same warmth of heart, the same eagerness of fancy and spirits” (233). This Eliza left her abusive husband only to be seduced by another man, who left her with a child and a

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fatal illness but no money. The child Eliza bears before she dies is also named Eliza and Brandon took her under his care. This second Eliza is later seduced, left pregnant and abandoned by Willoughby. Brandon’s imagined comparison between Marianne and the two Elizas leads him to conclude that Marianne, with a “mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced” as the other women, will react to any rough experiences in the world in the same way—essentially that she will ruin herself if she finds out how bad the world is

(234).35

Elinor understands his logic, but firmly disagrees with it, making a subtle but essentially Wollstonecraftian argument—that keeping a woman in ignorance is more likely to put her in harm’s way than attempting to “protect” her from such brutal knowledge. As Wollstonecraft argues in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices.— Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! (22)

Wollstonecraft indicates in numerous places throughout Rights of Woman that the trend of education in young women leads them toward a lifestyle of sexual vulnerability, which she terms “sensuality” (192).36 In fact, she addresses women like Marianne specifically

35 After being forced into a marriage by a man who was named her guardian, Eliza was mistreated by a husband who “had no regard for her; … [whose] pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly” (234). Brandon finally finds her in a poor house “in the last stage of a consumption, … [where] Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death” (207). Because Eliza allows herself to be seduced by another man, her husband divorces her and takes control of her fortune. She is left with only a “legal allowance … not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance” (235).

36 “Women subjected by ignorance to their sensations, and only taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion, which lead them shamefully to neglect the duties of life, and frequently in the midst of these sublime refinements they plump into actual vice” (192).

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in her discussion of novels and novel reading (which I discuss in greater detail in

Chapter 4). Wollstonecraft would categorize Marianne’s way of thinking as “feminine weakness of character, often produced by a confined education” and considers it “a romantic twist of the mind, which has been very properly termed sentimental” (192). She attributes this weakness to the fact that they are “subjected by ignorance to their sensations, and only taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion, which lead them shamefully to neglect the duties of life, and frequently in the midst of these sublime refinements they plump into actual vice” (192). Elinor’s actions suggest that she believes what

Wollstonecraft says about Marianne’s sentimentality and “notions.” Her vigilance over

Marianne includes a protectiveness of her mind and body as it relates to the potential for real danger in the world; Elinor refuses to allow Marianne’s disregard for propriety to go unchecked when it might lead her into situations that could put her in the power of men like the ones who seduced the first Eliza. Marianne’s idealism makes her blind to situations like the ones Austen introduces into the novel through the female characters in Colonel Brandon’s narrative.

Whatever critics might say about Elinor’s perceived prudery, she acts primarily out of a very real concern that Marianne might find herself in a situation like that of the two “Elizas,” whose stories haunt the periphery of the novel with their grim reality of disease, disgrace, abandonment, and death. Marianne has no fortune to make herself an attractive prospective bride; nor do her connections raise her high enough to bring any great rank to a marriage. Whatever these women’s novels speak to, they must also speak to the material and physical realities that threaten vulnerable women like

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Marianne who expect fortune-hunting men to behave honorably toward women who have no fortunes. Women’s friends and relations must protect them from such dangers—and the means of protection is found in the manners and customs that mark relationships between those women. Such habits of action mark the necessary level of sympathy; through such active sympathy, awareness of others brings both individual and collective agency. Women’s friendships—and by extension their communities— allow them to watch protectively over one another. This deep level of concern indicates a level of care that is situated at the core of Austen’s active and embodied model of sympathy.

Individual Development within Community

Austen structures her novels in a way that insists upon the individual development of her heroines prior to the standard resolution of the courtship plot. In every novel, the marriage proposal takes place several chapters prior to the end of the novel while Austen skims somewhat infamously over the marriage itself. Instead, the heroine begins her journey toward self-knowledge and agency situated within a female community. Once she completes the process of individuation, she chooses her own fate—to the degree that this is possible in the context of a pre-conscribed genre and culture that insisted upon marriage. She is then resituated within a new female community. This process does not take a linear route, but involves a multi-dimensional path and a web-like set of relationships. What Austen has to say about the quality and constitution of this community changes from the early to late novels, but a survey of the endings of the novels shows a degree of optimism that the novels themselves may not contain. These endings suggest that Austen believed that women’s agency and female community go hand in hand; proper, rational thought and the ability to balance emotion

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with reason attracts like-minded women to each other. Echoing this sentiment, the authors who inspired and influenced Austen’s work inhabit its pages like a “small band of true friends” (528).

In her early novels, Austen demonstrates the benefits and potential of these relationships. The values represented in the microcosm of individual friendships reach outward and inform the broader community, resonating through it, and reinforcing the bond of the initial pairs. The absence or presence of these factors plays a notable part in the development of Austen’s various heroines. To borrow William Deresiewicz’s definition from “Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice,” women’s community can be defined as more than just "a set of social activities and behavioral norms,” it

“also functions as a set cognitive processes or … mental habits" (504). Deresiewicz explains that the “dynamic of communal cognition through dialogue” is a process that

“involves both [the] homogenization and differentiation" of each individual voice (511).37

Communal cognition is a collective, dialogic process of meaning-making in the lives of each woman, the importance of which is partially constituted within her individual friendships, partially developed within her own consciousness, and partially reinforced by the community around her.

As in individual friendships, demonstrations of sympathy within community represent a strength and a sign of virtue in all characters. Active, embodied sympathy

37 As every critic must, Deresiewicz takes a stab at Pride and Prejudice’s famous opening line, claiming that the “truth universally acknowledged” represents the collective wisdom of the community in which the novel is situated. Deresiewicz’s argues that this community’s ideas and opinions have a direct bearing on Elizabeth’s development as a character. However, Deresiewicz speaks of community in general, and never singles out women’s community. I find this highly problematic, particularly considering the fact that the most extensive supporting example he uses comes from a scene in Pride and Prejudice in which a group composed entirely of women demonstrate his theory of “dynamic of communal cognition through dialogue" (511). This fact seems to escape him entirely.

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solidifies friendships and strengthens the community that protects them all. Therefore,

Austen places great importance on what people do in response to the needs of the members of their communities. Characters make active choices and exhibit observable behaviors in response to their emotional interactions with others. Characters choose to extend or withhold sympathy, in both individual relationships and in what Austen frequently refers to as “circles” of friends. Individuals choose to act in ways that promote the good of the group collectively without overlooking the needs of the individual, or they choose to act selfishly. Austen explores this delicate balance, in its various dimensions, throughout the novels.

Women’s community develops as the sympathetic bonds between individuals expand to include a circle of friends and family. This can be seen in Elinor’s discussion with Marianne as she gently attempts to lead her overwrought sister to a sense of awareness of her place in hearts of the women around her. She begins in the context of their relationship and then moves outward to their circle of friends. Elinor explains this concept in a way best suited to Marianne’s frame of mind, by appealing to her emotional side. Part of the evidence of Marianne’s immaturity is that, though she does love Elinor and share in her feelings, she still lacks a full degree of truly selfless sympathy, as evidenced in her inability to understand Elinor’s sympathy toward her. Marianne speaks first:

"I know you feel for me; I know what a heart you have; but yet you are -- you must be happy; Edward loves you -- what, oh! what can do away such happiness as that?" "Many, many circumstances," said Elinor, solemnly. "No, no, no," cried Marianne wildly; "[Edward] loves you, and only you. You can have no grief." "I can have no pleasure while I see you in this state." (emphasis in original 211)

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Here Elinor attempts to show Marianne that her own happiness depends upon her sister’s emotional state. She does not stop there, however. She reminds Marianne twice to think of their mother and “think of her misery while you suffer; for her sake you must exert yourself," thereby making the same emotional connection with Mrs. Dashwood, who is another member of their female community (211). In doing so, Elinor evokes the reciprocal nature of emotion that ties the women together. Sympathy inspires them to reach out and accept the natural overflow of sorrow in times of grief. However, since the feelings of one woman affect them all, they also have a responsibility to one another to maintain a degree of emotional balance. Communal fellow feeling serves as a balm and a safety net, but it also involves an element of commitment, to which Austen alludes in

Northanger Abbey. In such times, they should “not desert one another [since] they are an injured body” (30).

Elinor, in particular, exemplifies this quality. Returning to her night of watching over Marianne, consider her complicated response to Marianne’s recovery:

Elinor could not be cheerful. Her joy was of a different kind, and led to anything rather than to gaiety. Marianne restored to life, health, friends, and to her doating mother, was an idea to fill her heart with sensations of exquisite comfort, and expand it in fervent gratitude; -- but it led to no outward demonstrations of joy, no words, no smiles. All within Elinor's breast was satisfaction, silent and strong. (356)

Elinor’s sympathetic emotional response is communal, her internal joy consists of the emotions that she both shares with and anticipates for others. Here Austen agrees with

Hume’s definitions of the role of the imagination in the creation of sympathy. As Elinor imagines the joy that others will feel, her own present joy becomes magnified by the

“idea” of Marianne’s recovery, and what that will mean for Marianne, her “friends, and …

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her doating mother” (356). This “idea,” present in her mind before the fullness of these events has occurred, is enough to “fill her heart with sensations of exquisite comfort”

(356).

Hume explains this phenomenon through our capacity for self-awareness, which is a bridge to sympathetic understanding: “the idea, or rather impression of ourselves is always intimately present with us” (239). Since both the mind and body of every person are made of the same materials, we can always find grounds for sympathy. As Hume puts it,

we never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves. The case is the same with the fabric of the mind, as with that of the body. However the parts may differ in shape or size, their structure and composition are in general the same. (239)

Because we are made of the same materials—the very “fabric of our mind[s]” is the same—we can share emotions in equal strength. Hume’s emphasis on similarity over difference also paves the way for the egalitarian implications of sympathy upon which women’s communities are based. Austen sometimes draws women of different abilities and temperaments together through their more essential natures, finding common ground in “their structure[s] and composition,” though their “parts may differ in shape or size” (239). As with other types of development, Austen uses these interactions to test her heroines and their capacity for sympathy.

Intriguingly, Austen often uses good-natured but slightly annoying characters, or else characters of lower birth or means, to make a bid for an egalitarian view of women’s community and solidarity. Through these characters she shows that women in all (or most) walks of life should look out for one another when things get rough. On this

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matter she is consistent throughout her life. First, in Sense and Sensibility, Austen utilizes the loud, gossiping, socially inept Mrs. Jennings to try the patience and character of Elinor and Marianne. Even the reader enjoys plenty of harmless laughs at

Mrs. Jennings’ dim wittedness; yet she genuinely wishes everyone well in spite of her utter lack of tact.38 Underneath the laughter, however, Mrs. Jennings maintains a crucial part of Marianne and Elinor’s female circle. She makes it possible for them to go to

London; she opens her home to Colonel Brandon; she protects Marianne and cares for her when she becomes ill. She takes the place of their mother while their mother cannot be with them.

Once again, Marianne’s great failing in understanding her part in the female community shows most in her dealings with Mrs. Jennings. Marianne has been prejudiced against Mrs. Jennings from the start, based largely on her romanticized idealism that tells her that a silly, unrefined woman cannot have delicate feelings.

Following her assumptions to their logical conclusion, Marianne dehumanizes Mrs.

Jennings by assuming that her lower intellect makes her less capable of sophisticated emotion. This bias causes her to be blinded to Mrs. Jennings’ good qualities. In the midst of her great disappointment with Willoughby, Marianne responds to Mrs.

Jennings’ genuine concern for her with disgust:

[Marianne’s] heart was hardened against the belief of Mrs. Jennings's entering into her sorrows with any compassion. ‘No, no, no, it cannot be," she cried; "she cannot feel. Her kindness is not sympathy; her good-nature is not tenderness. All that she wants is gossip, and she only likes me now because I supply it.’

38 Austen gives Mrs. Jennings the authorial kick of being inadvertently correct in her prognostications of marriage dates, if not quite in the pairing of the parties. “Mrs. Jennings's prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas” (425).

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Elinor had not needed this to be assured of the injustice to which her sister was often led in her opinion of others, by the irritable refinement of her own mind, and the too great importance placed by her on the delicacies of a strong sensibility, and the graces of a polished manner. Like half the rest of the world, if more than half there be that are clever and good, Marianne, with excellent abilities and an excellent disposition, was neither reasonable nor candid. She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself. (228-29).

Here is perhaps the best and most precise description of a lack of Austen’s developing definition of sympathy—even in an essentially “good” person. As Emma echoes later,

Marianne’s mistake lies in her own inability to comprehend the idea that “one half of the world” has an interior perspective of equal value to her own (Emma 87). True sympathy requires one to enter into the “opinions and feelings” of others before passing judgment on them. Marianne bases her emotional and intellectual responses on narcissistic impulses rather than allowing, as she does in very small part earlier, for the natural

“differences of taste [and] … feelings” that she considers when thinking of Elinor’s attachment to Edward (20). Even in that case, Marianne has trouble imagining what those feelings are, entering into them, or understanding how Elinor could be happy with such a boring man. In the same way, Marianne cannot fathom that Mrs. Jennings might be so unlike her and yet be able to share in her suffering as a woman and a mother.

Marianne mistakes outward behavior for inner sincerity or candor.

In contrast, Mrs. Jennings evinces real sympathy toward Marianne and represents the way women of every variety can be necessary to one another in times of need:

[Mrs. Jennings’] heart was really grieved. The rapid decay, the early death of a girl so young, so lovely as Marianne, must have struck a less interested person with concern. On Mrs. Jennings's compassion she had other claims. She had been for three months her companion, was still

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under her care, and she was known to have been greatly injured, and long unhappy. The distress of her sister too, particularly a favourite, was before her; -- and as for their mother, when Mrs. Jennings considered that Marianne might probably be to her what Charlotte was to herself, her sympathy in her sufferings was very sincere. (emphasis in original 354)

Austen’s tone at this moment distinguishes the difference between silliness of behavior and sincerity of heart. Mrs. Jennings, however lacking in manners and taste, has the capacity to enter into Marianne’s feelings, as well as those of her mother and sister, and experience “sincere” sympathy. Austen shows here that our humanity unites us; in this case, the material bonds of sisterhood and motherhood can be replicated through sympathetic friendships and, in turn, build community. Mrs. Jennings demonstrates the capacity women have to share collective emotion, just as she has shared her home, her time, and herself with the girls. Mrs. Jennings cannot be valued as an intellectual equal to the Dashwood sisters. In spite of her money, Mrs. Jennings has no taste, elegance, or refinement of manners. Yet, as a caring companion and a sympathetic friend, Mrs.

Jennings proves her worth as a member of a broader network of women. She may not be able to discuss Shakespeare with them, but she provides protection, shows them regard, and displays a deep sense of caring and concern for them both that exceeds that shown by some members of their own family.

Austen carries this theme through nearly all of the later novels, although class issues cannot be ignored entirely in these comparisons. Nonetheless, in spite of class disparities, the overall message still tends toward the idea that the common ground found among women can be weighted heavier than issues of class. In each case, the quality of women’s community can be seen through the way it treats its most vulnerable members; it either protects or neglects them.

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For example, Emma presents several complex combinations of this type of character, all of whom seem to be formulated to expose and test the true motives and principles of its heroine. Harriet Smith, for instance, is intellectually and socially inferior to Emma. 39 Yet Austen presents a more nuanced problem with Miss Bates, who is intellectually inferior, and whose social position has changed through the course of her life. Conversely, Jane Fairfax does not fit any of these roles. As Emma’s intellectual equal, she represents Emma’s closest chance for equal friendship, in spite of her initial position of slightly lower class. As a woman, her position is unfixed because she is unmarried. By introducing Jane Fairfax into Emma Woodhouse’s world, Austen creates potential friendship, which Emma fails to accept. All three of these outsiders teach

Emma lessons that she learns a bit too late. The benefits of women’s friendship in

Emma can be best learned through the losses of women’s friendship.

One difference in Austen’s use of these characters can be seen in Persuasion and Mansfield Park. In these cases, socially inferior outsiders uncover the flaws in the community of women rather than helping individual heroines develop. In Persuasion,

Anne Elliot has no trouble treating the socially inferior Mrs. Smith as an equal. Anne’s connection with Mrs. Smith, who bears some resemblance to both Harriet Smith and

Miss Bates, results from the “kindness [she showed] in one of those periods of [Anne’s] life when it had been most valuable” when Anne, “grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved, feeling her separation from home, and suffering as a girl of

39To a lesser degree, Catherine maintains this role in Northanger Abbey, since either her inferior fortune or her social awkwardness consistently reveal the true nature of the people around her. Only Pride and Prejudice lacks a female character who is either inferior in class or socially awkward while remaining within the fold of the nurturing female community.

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fourteen” greatly benefited from the care of Mrs. Smith, who “had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery, and could never be remembered with indifference” (165). Mrs. Smith serves the purpose of revealing the lack of sympathetic solidarity of numerous other women in the story. In spite of this warm connection and debt of gratitude, her father and sister’s only concern is that Mrs.

Smith is a poor widow who lives in “low company, paltry rooms, foul air, [and has] disgusting associations” (171). Mrs. Smith’s presence establishes a barometer that marks the void of women’s community in Anne’s life.

Likewise, in Mansfield Park the heroine Fanny Price fills this role. Austen emphasizes her social inferiority from the moment she enters the building, and her interactions with every woman in the novel expose the truth of their characters as it relates to their ability to participate in an egalitarian women’s community. Sir Thomas sets the tone, dictating that Fanny must “be sensible of her uncommon good fortune in having such friends,” warning his family they must “prepare [them]selves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner” (3).

None of the women of the family choose to oppose this patriarchal dictate by reaching out to her or treating her otherwise throughout her stay in their home. The women at

Mansfield abuse Fanny’s inferior position in various ways, revealing their utter lack of communal feeling.

In every case, class barriers give way to tests of character; and social position proves less important than the social limitations shared by every woman. Common cultural constructions create the potential for community through sympathy. The female outsider in Austen’s novels tests its communities, providing both the heroine and her

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community an opportunity to define more precisely the qualities of true women’s friendship.

False Friends

Austen goes further than arguing that women have a great capacity for sympathy, she makes sympathy a human quality that represents strength of character in both men and women. Nonetheless, since female friendships occupy the bulk of the novel, sympathetic bonds between women hold greater importance. As a result, the relationships that display egregious failures of sympathetic understanding feature just as prominently.

In Sense and Sensibility Austen paints one of the most humorous pictures of a woman incapable of sympathy in the person of Fanny Dashwood, whose glaring self- interest leaves her incapable of having any compassion for the grief or the needs of others. She considers her husband’s idea to give his sisters any money absurd and delivers a bitter harangue on the subject to him upon the heels of his father’s death. In her zeal for ensuring that every bit of the fortune left to her husband by his father remain at their disposal, she uses the faculty of the imagination—which should serve to make her more sympathetic to the Dashwood women—to turn their situation of genuine poverty into wealth:

They will live so cheap! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants; they will keep no company, and can have no expences of any kind! Only conceive how comfortable they will be! Five hundred a-year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give you something. (emphasis in original 14)

Part of the twisted humor of Fanny’s imaginative calculations involves the fact that the lack of “expenses” of the others has mainly to do with their being unceremoniously

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tossed out of their home by Fanny and her husband. Through Fanny Dashwood, Austen shows the extreme effects of self-interestedness. However, many of the other women who enter the lives of Austen’s heroines are far less transparent in their roles as adversaries. Although “enemy” is a strong word, these women often serve as obstacles to the heroine’s happiness. I will call them false friends, since they invariably possess most of the qualities exactly opposite that of a true friend.

Austen does seem to incorporate some of the antagonistic portions of Johnson’s definition of friendship into her own. In her novels, the bonds of friendship are sometimes based in part upon a common enemy. At minimum, her narratives invoke the idea that a woman needs to interact with antagonists to understand fully what it means to have friends. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s true friend Eleanor Tilney is preceded by the vacuous and morally questionable Isabella Thorpe. Isabella is just the sort of girl of whom a nice girl like Catherine should be wary. Isabella is a mockery of the sisterly bond Austen creates with the true female friends in her novels. Isabella’s loose moral compass and general silliness reflect poorly on Catherine’s character in public; and she takes a perverse delight in putting Catherine in awkward positions for the sake of her own amusement. She is a fortune hunter who makes use of Catherine as a prop or chaperone, as needed. Worst of all, her self-serving actions put Catherine in the dangerous clutches of her violent and lecherous brother. By the time she learns of

Isabella’s false nature, Catherine has found a true friend, one whose positive qualities can be seen in sharper relief by the machinations and deceitful behavior of Isabella. The twenty first century has come up with the perfect term for the Isabella Thorpes of the world—frenemy.

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The specific qualities of women’s friendship—intimacy, sympathy, and care—can be seen corrupted or reversed in these false friendships. While true friendship is marked by an intimacy that creates trust and the sharing of secrets and emotions between confidants; a false friend lacks the capacity to value confidences, or views them as a source of manipulation. Austen first plays with the social and novelistic constructions of female friendship, particularly that of false emotional intimacy, in Northanger Abbey when she describes the superficial friendship between the heroine Catherine Moreland and her new friend Isabella Thorpe. Within moments of their first meeting the girls strike up a conversation. Austen’s playful mockery of their fast friendship ends with a gentle admission of the need for female companionship:

Their conversation turned upon those subjects, of which the free discussion has generally much to do in perfecting a sudden intimacy between two young ladies: such as dress, balls, flirtations, and quizzes. … Their increasing attachment was not to be satisfied with half a dozen turns in the pump–room, but required, when they all quitted it together, that Miss Thorpe should accompany Miss Morland to the very door of Mr. Allen’s house …that they should see each other across the theatre at night, and say their prayers in the same chapel the next morning. Catherine then ran directly upstairs, and watched Miss Thorpe’s progress down the street from the drawing–room window; admired the graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and dress; and felt grateful, as well she might, for the chance which had procured her such a friend. (25, 26)

The rush of emotion expressed by the girls in these scenes echoes that of young lovers: an overemphasis on appearance and manners, an insistence on spending every moment together, and the flush of excitement attached to every action. Nonetheless,

Catherine’s parting thought—her desire for companionship—rings true.

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These scenes in Northanger Abbey are actually a toned-down version of the same in Love and Freindship,40 in which Austen goes to greater extremes to emphasize the superficiality of false intimacy and quick attachments:

After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind (for such I term your Mother) imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name. Sophia was rather above the middle size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely features, but increased their Beauty—. It was the Charectarestic [sic] of her Mind—. She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts—. (113-114)

In each case, Austen satirizes the idea that emotional connections can be formed through a quick exchange of secrets and through words alone. Taken as a whole,

Austen’s descriptions of these budding relationships reveal that actions and time are required to prove character and develop friendship.

When Austen turns to Sense and Sensibility, the figure of the false friend takes on a slightly more devious dimension. Northanger Abbey’s Isabella Thorpe was only silly and vain, but in Sense and Sensibility, we find a woman who uses the convention of intimacy and confidence on purpose to hurt Elinor. Lucy Steele forces Elinor to hear her secrets and, in doing so, causes a great deal of emotional anguish. Lucy is more than selfish—she is cruel. Elinor finds her out quickly enough, but Lucy manages to impose on a number of other women for the majority of the novel. Similarly, in Pride and

Prejudice, Caroline Bingley initially befriends Jane Bennet out of boredom, but when she finds her conquest of Mr. Darcy in danger, she manipulates the trappings of intimacy to serve her own interests with complete disregard for the hurt she causes

40 See note above about the misspelling of the title of Austen’s Love and Freindship and the text therein.

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Jane. Somewhat like the naïve Catherine Moreland, it takes the good-natured Jane

Bennet a long time to realize that all of these outward signs have been completely manufactured. Like Catherine, a comparison to her sister’s intimacy, confidence, and care helps her understand her mistake.

As with true friendship, sympathy serves as the greatest barometer for gauging false friendship. False friends demonstrate an incapacity for experiencing sympathy or making the active choices that true sympathy inspires. As a corollary, false friends prove unable to provide care for anyone other than themselves. They tend to protest often and loudly about their own needs for care, but tend to be blind to the needs of others. After abandoning Catherine time and time again for her own amusement, the first time Catherine’s needs get in the way of her own, Isabella turns on her, accusing her of “having more affection for Miss Tilney, though she had known her so little a while, than for her best and oldest friends, with being grown cold and indifferent, in short, towards herself” (98). Since Catherine has had the chance to experience true friendship, she begins to suspect Isabella around this time and wonders inwardly, “Was it the part of a friend thus to expose her feelings to the notice of others? Isabella appeared to her ungenerous and selfish, regardless of everything but her own gratification” (98-99). As in other cases, a growing awareness of both herself and others marks the development of Austen’s heroine. Both true and false friends can be useful.

True friends support emotional growth; false friends teach young women about the differences between appearances and internal realities. Women like Isabella Thorpe teach women like Catherine a lesson in healthy wariness.

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Sense and Sensibility’s Lucy Steele is quite a different creature. Every interaction she initiates with Elinor takes on the outward forms of friendship but is utterly void of its substance; likewise, her acts of so-called friendship conceal tactical maneuvers that are part of her matrimonial schemes. In her first private meeting with Elinor, she lays down the groundwork for her mission. She makes use of numerous forms of women’s friendship—the sharing of secrets, an appeal for sympathetic understanding, an implication of common experience, and a call for sisterly advice or mentorship. First she reveals her secret engagement to Edward Ferrars, whom she suspects harbors a deep admiration of Elinor. She turns her intimate sharing into an opportunity to warn off her potential rival, showing herself to be entirely void of sincere emotion. Well aware of the connotations of intimacy that sharing secrets implies, Lucy tells Elinor, “‘I was afraid you would think I was taking a great liberty with you,’ said she, ‘in telling you all this” (152).

She follows this facetious beginning with an affected appeal to Elinor’s compassion, “‘I am so unfortunate … I only wonder that I am alive after what I have suffered for

Edward's sake these last four years. Everything in such suspense and uncertainty, and seeing him so seldom -- we can hardly meet above twice a-year. I am sure I wonder my heart is not quite broke’" (152-53). Lucy’s allusions to having “known you and all your family by description a great while” before Elinor knew of her is of course the whole point of this game (152). Lucy is here to mark her territory and warn off a potential rival to Edward’s affections. Austen’s humorous and markedly brief conclusion to this interchange—“Here [Lucy] took out her handkerchief; but Elinor did not feel very compassionate”—makes it clear that Elinor does not fall for Lucy’s false act even in its

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earliest moments (153). Lucy, like Isabella before her, represents a mockery of everything that true women’s friendship can be.

Interestingly, Austen’s “false friends” have made their own journey of self- discovery prior to the novels. In a dark parallel to the heroine, they do “know themselves” and understand the world; however, they choose to know it in a mercenary light and have determined to make different, selfish choices from the heroines that are based on the system that patriarchy has dictated. Isabella Thorpe’s designs are made clear by her pursuit of a man of higher rank once she finds out that her fiancé has less money than she thought he did. Lucy Steel exposes herself in precisely the same way— changing from one brother to the next to follow the family inheritance. Even looking forward into the later novels, a character like Mary Crawford, who attempts to befriend

Fanny Price, has no false pretensions when it comes to morality, social climbing, or mercenary marriages in her conversations with her brother. It takes Fanny a bit longer to realize that “Edward would be forgiven for being a clergyman … under certain conditions of wealth,” for Miss Crawford “had only learnt to think nothing of consequence but money” (226). In Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s sisters, who might have been her companions, show no concern for their life choices, which have involved the constant pursuit of suitable marriages. These women may be unhappy, but it is only a result of not having the things they know they want. Nonetheless, in the service of

Austen’s underlying moral reasoning—that positive women’s friendships create and support women’s communities and characters—Austen ensures that by the end of the novel, the true character of such false friends is made known.

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Pride and Prejudice introduces a more nuanced kind of friendship in the character of Charlotte Lucas. Among all the close female relationships in Austen’s novels, I find no parallel to that of Elizabeth’s friendship with Charlotte. At the beginning of the novel Austen describes Elizabeth’s relationship with Charlotte in ways that parallel those of other true friendships. She is introduced as her “intimate friend” and the novel establishes early on that their families have been long acquainted (19). They spend time together almost daily, they share confidences, and Elizabeth believes—until she is surprised by Charlotte’s engagement to Mr. Collin’s—that they think alike. This sense she has of their likeness of mind is underscored by the shock Elizabeth feels when she learns that Charlotte has accepted the marriage proposal from Mr. Collins. At the first ball, she laughs at Charlotte’s comments about portraying false emotions to catch a husband. To Charlotte’s suggestion that “a woman had better show more affection than she feels, Elizabeth responds with a laugh, “You know it is not sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself” (emphasis in original 24, 25). Yet however close they have been in the past, Charlotte’s engagement precipitates a permanent cooling of their relationship. In her choice of partner, and even after her marriage,

Charlotte exhibits some of the characteristics of the false friends in Sense and

Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, the most conspicuous of which is her determination to, as Elizabeth puts it, “get a rich husband, or any husband” (24).

I do not mean to say that Charlotte is a false friend, only that her role in

Elizabeth’s life, and in Austen’s novels in general, is unique. I see Charlotte as a symptom of Elizabeth’s impartial understanding of herself, as well as Austen’s insistence on keeping the novel honest. Charlotte introduces discomfort into the bright,

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sparkling world of Pride and Prejudice—more so by being in the fold of a women’s community that seemed to include her as Elizabeth’s true nonfamilial friend. Her loss seems more real because Elizabeth believed her to be so. Elizabeth and Charlotte’s early discussion about Jane’s treatment of Bingley and the nature of marriage reads as a thinly veiled social commentary, but it also reveals Elizabeth’s limitations as a friend, for it shows how little attention she has paid to Charlotte’s perspective and thoughts in their longstanding relationship. At this early stage in the novel, Elizabeth’s failure to understand Charlotte echoes her lack of insight into herself.

After Charlotte has accepted Mr. Collins’ proposal, she justifies her decision to

Elizabeth by explaining what she sees as the essentially problematic nature of the structure of marriage itself—

But when you have had time to think it all over, I hope you will be satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic, you know; I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins's character, connexions, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state." (140-41)

Like the other characters who are “false friends,” Charlotte’s statement creates an odd parallel to Elizabeth’s later self-revelation—her moment of “knowing herself” in the realization of her faulty thinking. In this case, Charlotte has already examined herself and her desires for her life. She knows what she wants and how to go about it given her limited options. Neither Elizabeth nor the reader may approve of Charlotte’s choice, but she has made it. She knows herself and what she can live with. After a visit to

Charlotte’s marital home, Elizabeth leaves Charlotte with great sadness in what “she had chosen …with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion” (239). Elizabeth has trouble imagining

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that Charlotte can be contented, but senses that “[h]er home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms”

(239-40). Along with her own revelations then, she must acknowledge the truth of

Charlotte’s reality—that some women choose their own levels of sacrifice and choose to be contented with this exchange of marital prostitution for a comfortable home, a parish, and an acceptable portion of poultry.

Charlotte’s sentiments echo a kind of upended Wollstonecraftian view of marriage, where Wollstonecraft uses her stark view to emphasize women’s need for independence of thought: Austen-via-Charlotte emphasizes mercenary realities. We laugh at Mr. Collins’ silly proposal precisely because it represents such a mockery of the romanticization of what is actually a financial arrangement. Here is Mr. Collins in the midst of his proposal to Elizabeth:

But the fact is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy myself without resolving to chuse a wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place -- which, however, as I have already said, may not be for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection. (119)

I think Mr. Collins may be one of the funniest characters ever to appear on page or screen. Yet Mr. Collins’ comedic value is inevitably tied up in the same reality that makes it prudent for Charlotte Lucas to accept an offer knowing that she was the second choice of this ridiculous man. Charlotte may not have the added incentive that

Elizabeth has with the entail of her father’s estate, but her future remains just as vulnerable as Elizabeth’s without the security that Mr. Collins’ marriage proposal

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guarantees. If Elizabeth has the good fortune of stumbling into an actual romantic connection with a rich man while also maintaining her dignity and expanding her mind, her case stands out, even among the women in her own novel, as an exception.

Charlotte Lucas demonstrates that Austen is aware of the real limitations for women.

As for the remnants of their friendship, later in the novel, the reader hears Mr.

Collins convey some information via a letter that he can only have heard from

Charlotte—a bit of nasty gossip about years past in the Bennet household. Although a minor detail, Austen suggests that Charlotte has chosen her alliances. In their sole post- marital visit, Elizabeth leaves Charlotte in a rather sad female circle—one presided over by the magisterial Lady Catherine, and peopled with her “sickly” daughter, her nursemaid, and anyone else who can be frightened into groveling in Lady Catherine’s drawing rooms. The uneasy, unsatisfying estrangement of the two friends shows Austen at the wheel, and reveals a bit of the machinations of an author controlling the fates of women that don’t always mesh with the real world. Charlotte’s husband Mr. Collins may amuse us, but her situation cannot.

As Austen dispatches all the rest of Elizabeth’s friends and sisters to their various destinies, she indulges in a bit of wish-fulfilment that feels satisfying to the reader.

Elizabeth’s younger sister Kitty gets a second chance at behaving well in public. Austen tells us in the closing chapter that “Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally known, her improvement was great” (427-28). The wealth of the two elder sisters allows them to maintain regular intercourse and the maintenance of the stronger female community that centers around Pemberley, which was also “now Georgiana's home”

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(430). Lydia, however, rarely visits them, lives in near poverty and in deep envy of her sisters’ good fortunes. Poor Mary, who is “the only daughter who remained at home,” receives her reward for boring her sisters with her moralizing and bad piano playing by being “necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet's being quite unable to sit alone” (428). One cannot help but think that each woman ends up with the sort of hourly female companionship that she has earned throughout the novel—either pleasantly engaged or interminably tormented.

Although at the end of Pride and Prejudice Austen settles Elizabeth in a comfortable circle of female companionship—with a new sister-in-law and within an

“easy” distance41 from her own sister—the loss of Charlotte’s friendship gives her real pain in a way that leaving the rest of her sisters and mother does not. The presence of this unique relationship, along with its uneasy resolution, marks a change in the trajectory of female friendships in Austen’s novels. After Pride and Prejudice, loss, absence, and failure mar most of the relationships between women.

“Think of What She Had Lost” – Absence and Loss of Friendship in Austen’s Later Novels

I find the transition from the bright, sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice to the pathos-laden pages of Mansfield Park quite dramatic. Considering that Austen’s novels focus on relationships and places, the contrasts are rather extreme. Fanny Price’s life represents a much harsher reality than even Charlotte Lucas’. At the end of Pride and

41 A discussion between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth during his first, failed marriage proposal establishes the ease with which Elizabeth and Jane may visit with one another after their respective marriages. Darcy refers to “fifty miles of good road[as] Little more than half a day's journey” and calls this an “easy distance” because the expense to him would be of little consequence (201). After the sisters are married, the Bingleys purchase an estate in “a neighbouring county to Derbyshire; and Jane and Elizabeth” end up living “within thirty miles of each other” (427). This would make visits between the two very “easy” and frequent.

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Prejudice, we leave a family party snug and settled in the beautiful environs of

Pemberley. In stark contrast, at the opening of Mansfield Park, we arrive at the cold

Mansfield mansion with the cast-off Fanny Price, experiencing first-hand with her the unkindness of its inhabitants and the extreme isolation she feels. Her uncle terrifies her, and though one aunt shows her a modicum of sympathy, the other considers it her duty to keep Fanny in her place and “make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram” because “[t]heir rank, fortune, rights, and expectations will always be different” (3).

Meanwhile, her female cousins tell her frequently that she is “odd,” “stupid,” and

“ignorant” (3). In Mansfield Park, Austen’s vision of women’s friendship can only be seen in the void where it should be, and in the figures of false friendship.

The relationship between Maria and Julia Bertram seems to be a cruel reversal of the closeness the Bennet sisters share; instead of sympathy and support, they harbor jealousy and resentment. Austen sums up the way their adult relationship has changed since their childhood during the rehearsal of a play. Julia reflects that

[t]he sister with whom she was used to be on easy terms was now become her greatest enemy: they were alienated from each other… With no material fault of temper, or difference of opinion, to prevent their being very good friends while their interests were the same, the sisters, under such a trial as this, had not affection or principle enough to make them merciful or just, to give them honour or compassion. (96)

The narrator’s reference to a common “interest” relates to a rivalry between the sisters for the attention of the unprincipled Henry Crawford. Both the situation and their responses to it betray their true characters, for in Austen’s estimation, their “affection” toward each other as friends and sisters should inspire “compassion” rather than resentment and jealousy. In this respect, she echoes Burney’s sentiments in Cecilia, where Cecilia and Henrietta Belfield discover a common affection for Mortimer Delvile.

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They respond with sympathy rather than rivalry. Like Burney, Austen makes clear that women’s friendship requires them to act upon a code of honour toward one another, which the Bertram sisters fail to do.

This rift underscores the deeper issue at hand—the role of sympathy in various relationships, and with a particular focus on female friendships. Throughout the rehearsals of the play, each character in the novel displays some level of self- absorption. Austen draws a perfect picture of the visible effects of the loss of sympathy by enumerating the selfish concerns of every person, including the steady, principled

Edmund, as they are caught up in “the fullness of their own minds” (86). As a result, they collectively extend the harshest omission of sympathy toward Fanny in a way that represents their treatment of her overall—they neglect her completely. In the midst of this play, and the underlying plotting and scheming among the players, Fanny “had no share in anything; she might go or stay; she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it to the solitude of the East room, without being seen or missed” (87). If sympathy means truly seeing another in order to understand their feelings and situation, then this is its opposite taken to an extreme. The utter void of sympathy may be defined as rendering another imperceptible. To the sisters, and every person around them,

Fanny is equally invisible and insignificant.

In spite of this rather dim picture, I view Austen’s shifting treatment of women’s friendship in the later novels as one of global optimism functioning within a negative, cautionary framework. Although Austen’s novels tend toward dry sarcasm and realism, they still contain within them glimmers of hope and guarded optimism. In one sense, the later novels focus more on the loss, absence, and failures of women’s friendships than

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the earlier novels. This might be viewed as a loss of faith on Austen’s part; perhaps she no longer sees the same potential for women’s friendships to change either women or the social structures that influence their lives. However, her unwavering focus on friendship—even through loss, absence, and failure—continues to indicate her belief in its importance. The endings of the novels hold the most compelling evidence. In the final three novels, she takes two different approaches. In Emma, Austen shows how a woman’s failure to practice egalitarian values in her relationships with other women can leave her isolated from the broader women’s community. In Mansfield Park and

Persuasion, Austen leaves her heroines with promises of the friendship, connections, and women’s community that have been missing throughout the novels.

Emma’s “Gentle Sorrow”

In Emma, women’s friendship can be seen in its loss, but mostly through its failures. After suffering the initial losses of her mother, sister, and most importantly, her governess, Emma is responsible for her failed friendships. Austen speaks through

Emma of the alterations women experience when one friend marries. In “Interrupted

Friendships in Jane Austen’s Emma,” Ruth Perry argues that “women’s friendship is a natural outgrowth of shared experience and interests,” as I have been describing up to this point (186). She goes on to say that “whatever blocks, distorts, or interrupts that friendship might be seen as symptomatic of the way the culture undercuts women’s power and self-sufficiency” (186). Perry uses “the model of interrupted friendship” to demonstrate Austen’s “unresolved but repeated plea for friendship between women” in

Emma (186, 200). I believe Emma can be best read in these missed opportunities.

The message of Emma has often been construed as an anti-feminist, “onerous big brotherism” because Mr. Knightley serves as the mouthpiece for so many of the

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“lessons” Emma must learn (Perry 187). However, a broader examination of community and the communal values the novel promotes makes the picture more complicated. If we direct our attention to the objects of Emma’s lessons, the themes of womanly solidarity and egalitarian values come into focus. For when Emma behaves badly, to whom does she do the most damage? Miss Bates and Harriet Smith fall victim to

Emma’s thoughtless games. Jane Fairfax suffers from Emma’s need to be the center of attention. When the opportunity arises to join the broader community of women, Emma chooses to isolate herself and retreat into an increasingly outdated system of patriarchal values—one Austen undermines in all of her novels. Despite Emma’s retreat, Austen consistently offers her opportunities to rejoin that community, emphasizing its importance through Knightley’s arguments. A truly egalitarian view would consider the message, and then perhaps the actions and character, rather than the gender, of the speaker.

Prior to the beginning of the novel, Emma has not suffered any significant disappointments or pains. Austen’s language underscores the significant changes patriarchal structures bring into the life of a woman. The story opens at the first point of loss in Emma’s otherwise charmed life:

Sorrow came -- a gentle sorrow -- but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness. Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. (4)

The marriage of a “beloved friend” constitutes a “loss” in spite of the happiness it brings in every other sense. Emma cares enough about Miss Taylor to be happy for her, but she understands the many ways her own life will change. Austen explains the complexity of this matter as a kind of metamorphosis: “It was true that her friend was

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going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house” (5). As in Mansfield Park, Austen draws connections between land, proximity to estates, and the status that names convey. By marrying a man who owns an estate,

‘Miss Taylor’ takes his name, transforms into a ‘Mrs. Weston,’ and becomes “mistress” of his estate. This change in name and status takes her physically away from Emma and changes profoundly the nature of their daily intercourse. Now Emma is “in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude” since her father can be “no companion for her. He [cannot] not meet her in conversation, rational or playful” (5). Emma’s companion ‘Miss Taylor’ disappears down the lane that stretches between the two estates and, however close they may be in literal miles, the change in physical distance does not seem to match the emotional alteration that attends Emma’s loss.

Austen chose to begin Emma’s narrative by setting up the first problem of

Emma’s life as a need for female companionship. Like Burney’s Cecilia, Austen places the impetus for forward action within the heart of the heroine and at the center of the narrative. From this point, however, the absence of women’s friendship is a direct result of Emma’s failure to be a good friend and to participate actively in any of the kinds of egalitarian, sympathetic relationships Austen models in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Ruth Perry has argued that Emma is unable “to enter into a relation of equality with other women” because she cannot accept the possibility of friendships in which one is neither patron nor dependent (“Interrupted Friendships” 190). As the novel moves forward, Emma suffers a great deal at her own hand by ruining her relationships with the other women who might have provided companionship. It takes Emma some

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time to discern the difference between a companion and a plaything, and to see the selfish disregard with which she has been treating those she believes to be her friends.

In many ways, the loss of Miss Taylor and Emma’s failed attempts at replacing her propel Emma toward maturity. Part of Emma’s development as an individual involves the realization that she cannot merely command those around her to love and sympathize with her; instead, she must earn it.

In an interesting shift from the previous novels, Emma exhibits many of the traits of a false friend. Her greatest flaws are self-absorption and a lack of sympathy toward others. She pursues a friendship with Harriet Smith to fill the boredom she feels as a young woman in a house with only her father and his elderly guests. Her “interest in”

Harriet we find is first “on account of her beauty,” which creates the dynamic of subject and object between them (22). Emma’s gaze on Harriet resembles that of the male gaze in many ways, for she seeks to groom Harriet in an effort to attract for her a wealthy, upper-class husband. Emma turns Harriet into an object as surely as any man does, perpetuating the patriarchal structure of the marriage market with her matchmaking schemes.

With Harriet, Emma attempts to take on the role of a mentor. In reality, though, she merely wishes to manipulate Harriet’s life for her own amusement. On the very first night of their meeting, she determines to take on Harriet as a kind of pet project, reflecting to herself,

She [Emma] would notice her [Harriet]; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers. (emphasis in original 23)

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In this and other reflections, Emma’s selfish motives peek through the veneer of good intentions. Although she seems to want to improve Harriet’s life, in fact, she desires something “interesting” to do, something to challenge her “powers” (23). As the evening progresses, she is “busy in admiring those soft blue eyes, in talking and listening, and forming … schemes” for Harriet’s future (23). Emma claims to seek out a good marriage for Harriet, yet her real intentions center upon securing a convenient companion for herself. As she tells Harriet when she thinks Mr. Elton has expressed his intention to court her through a charade, “This is a connection which offers nothing but good. It will give you everything that you want—consideration, independence, a proper home—it will fix you in the centre of all your real friends, close to Hartfield and to me, and confirm our intimacy forever” (78-79) For Emma, Harriet’s marriage must first suit her own interests; after all, she brought her into her life for that purpose. She separated Harriet from

Robert Martin for the same selfish reasons. As she tells Harriet rather bluntly when consulted on Robert Martin’s proposal, “‘It would have grieved me to lose your acquaintance, which must have been the consequence of your marrying Mr. Martin. … it would have been the loss of a friend to me’” (56). Harriet may be too kind to understand

Emma’s true motives, but Austen’s narrator clues her readers into these character flaws.

Emma’s first significant development as an individual comes as a result of her relationship with Harriet Smith. Only after causing Harriet real pain does she understand the callousness of her behavior. She also begins to understand a bit about the nature of egalitarian women’s friendships. Emma’s realization of Harriet’s character includes a complementary self-assessment that precedes the final dénouement she undergoes

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through her interactions with Miss Bates. First, Emma convinces Harriet to refuse

Robert Martin’s offer of marriage and then to fall in love with Mr. Elton—based in large part on Emma’s faulty conviction of his attraction to Harriet. In reality, Emma sees what she wants to see; Elton’s attentions are actually focused on herself. When Emma has to tell Harriet that she has been completely mistaken, Harriet’s kind response leaves

Emma with an overwhelming sense of humility:

Emma was in the humour to value simplicity and modesty to the utmost; and all that was amiable, all that ought to be attaching, seemed on Harriet's side, not her own. … [Harriet’s] tears fell abundantly—but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes—and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding—really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two—and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do. (153)

Here is Emma’s most distinctive acknowledgement that she is no mentor to Harriet. She recognizes at this moment that she should have been looking for companionship instead. Had Emma understood the egalitarian nature of women’s connectedness to one another—that “[h]owever the parts may differ in shape or size, their structure and composition are in general the same”—she might have been able to truly find a way to benefit them both (Hume 239). At minimum, Austen suggests that she should have been granting Harriet the benefit of equal consideration, thereby honoring the full range of women’s values—kindness, sincerity, and openness.

In her earlier novels, Austen deals with these qualities in more obvious dichotomies; in Emma, she blends them in various characters and focuses on language.

Her description of Harriet’s open, “amiable” nature echoes another discussion between

Emma and Mr. Knightley in which they quarrel over Emma’s description of Frank

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Churchill as an “amiable young man” (159). In it, Austen hones her definition of the term

“amiable” so that it reverberates through the rest of the novel. Austen plays with and expands the standard Johnsonian definition: ‘amiable,’ derived from French, means “1. lovely and pleasing … 2. pretending love; shewing love.” To behave ‘amiably’ is to act in

“such a manner as to incite love” (Dictionary 1:144-45). Johnson’s definition encompasses what Mr. Knightley calls the ‘French’ version of amiability, a series of behaviors that are superficial, selfishly motivated, and manipulative in nature. In Emma,

Mr. Knightley and Emma debate Mr. Churchill’s repeated failure to visit his father Mr.

Weston upon his marriage, which represents an insult to the new Mrs. Weston. His apologies have been flimsy and everyone but Mr. Knightley has strained to excuse this behavior. In this case, Knightley draws a picture of Churchill based upon his actions rather than his appearance:

‘I suspect [his excuses] do not satisfy Mrs. Weston. They hardly can satisfy a woman of her good sense and quick feelings: standing in a mother's place, but without a mother's affection to blind her. … No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘aimable,’ have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.’ (160)

Mr. Knightley’s insightful characterization of Mr. Churchill identifies the ways Churchill’s behavior falls short of the values Austen has been gradually establishing through women’s relationships as superior and universal values. Although they might escape the scrutiny of surface level social conventions, they cannot elude the test of application. Stuart Tave has also argued that Austen-via-Knightley develops the concept of English “delicacy” alongside that of amiability to encompass a “true English style [that] is not a display of feeling but a reality and an activity” (222). In Austen, then,

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we may understand “amiable” to denote a deeper sensitivity and responsiveness to the

“feelings of other people,” or what I have called active sympathy (161).

As an additional layer of this theme, Austen creates a unique relational tension between Mrs. Weston and Frank Churchill, since they are simultaneously related and unrelated. As Mr. Knightley puts it, Mrs. Weston “stand[s] in a mother's place, but without a mother's affection to blind her”; yet Knightley expects more “English delicacy towards the feelings of other people” from him toward her because she is not his mother and, most intriguingly, because she is a woman of “good sense and quick feelings”

(160). He might have said that delicacy required Mr. Churchill’s acknowledgement of her rise in status. Instead, we see yet another example of Austen’s valuation of character over status, making sympathy extend to egalitarian treatment of others.

Essentially, Mr. Churchill lacks the quality of sympathy and amiableness, which both Mr.

Knightley and Emma recognize in Harriet Smith. To confirm this association, Mr.

Knightley later tells Emma that he found Harriet “unpretending” and “artless” once he had the chance to speak to her, thus marking her as amiable in the “English” sense and connecting his assessment of her back to Emma’s (358).

Emma’s ultimate test of character comes a bit later in the novel, when she is called upon to develop her own active sympathy or, in Mr. Knightley’s lexicon, become

“amiable” in English. The most important part of Emma’s crisis and self-revelation involves her understanding of the important connection between herself and Miss

Bates. Miss Bates takes an even stronger role in Emma’s development than Mrs.

Jennings did with Marianne Dashwood, for she challenges Emma’s notions of class, taste, and sensibility. Miss Bates’ role in the community underscores the role of

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sympathy between women in numerous financial and social situations because she moves in several circles but manages to be beloved in them all. As a result, her character must account for the unique position she enjoys.

Austen’s first description of Miss Bates so closely mirrors that of Emma that she most certainly meant for it to contradict Emma’s own estimation of them both. Emma is

“handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home ... [and she] had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her” (3). Miss Bates is “a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married” who has to “endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible” (20). Like Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility,

“Miss Bates … had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness … And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will.” (20). Austen enumerates the qualities of sympathy that make Miss

Bates such a loved and sought after member of Highbury:

She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself. She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited Mr. Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip. (20)

Her “interest in every body’s happiness” is evident throughout the novel as she gives the minutest details of their lives, and those “little matters” that make up her “trivial communications and harmless gossip” in fact show her particular manner of caring for the people around her (20). To be sure, she must also appear tiresome to some; but

Austen’s message is clear—“It was her own universal good-will and contented temper

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which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, [and was] quick-sighted to every body's merits” (20). The entire community of Highbury knows and feels Miss Bates’ “universal good-will.” She embodies active sympathy. Conversely, Emma’s inattentiveness to her, her inability to “see” and appreciate her—much like the inhabitants of Mansfield Park choose not to see Fanny

Price—represents Emma’s lack of sympathy.

In a discussion with Harriet, Emma protests vehemently against an attempt to compare her to Miss Bates. Emma initially imagines that she cannot be like Miss Bates because of their difference in income, while underestimating her own entrapment in the patriarchal system that gives her access to it:

… if I thought I should ever be like Miss Bates! so silly -- so satisfied -- so smiling -- so prosing -- so undistinguishing and unfastidious -- and so apt to tell every thing relative to every body about me, I would marry tomorrow. But between us, I am convinced there never can be any likeness, except in being unmarried. (emphasis in original 91)

Emma’s idea of flouting marriage is admirable but absurd in its assumption that she can do away with one aspect—marriage—without doing away with the other—the system that has granted her the fortune that she admits allows her the freedom to remain single. She insists that “it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid!” (91). Paul Delaney helps explain Emma’s understanding of class and status:

Class can be precisely quantified, and Austen is notoriously fond of such quantifications ... A large number in Austen is sure to have a pound sign attached to it. ... But in Austen's England, wealth is only one axis of rank ... The other axis measures ... status ... Status groups form cultures of

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stability, exclusion, and distinction, and place great value on sheer length of tenure. (534)42

Emma’s discomfort at being associated with Miss Bates reveals her own class anxiety as it relates to what Delaney distinguishes here as “status.” Emma’s attempted classification of Miss Bates begins with a quantification of income and ends with a generalization about the abstract connections between income, class, and character. In her snobbish insistence that these attributes are conjoined, she adds, “[t]hose who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross” (91). Critics have generally accepted Emma’s assessment of Miss Bates’ situation, without considering the numerous statements that contradict it.

Ruth Perry says that “Miss Bates … is the perennial reminder of the social helplessness of an old maid,” comparing her to “a dependent child” because “she is a burden … despite her sterling character and cheerful disposition. Carriages must be sent for her, she must be fed—with hampers of apples and loins of pork—and her endless repetitive chatter must be patiently listened to” (195). However, this assessment considers only Miss Bates’ financial situation and ignores completely all evidence of her social standing in the community. Even Emma, as she works through her financial argument against marriage, stumbles upon the problem of using Miss Bates as her example, thereby invalidating inadvertently her own argument: “This does not apply,

42 Delaney elaborates on this concept by giving the example of the length of time Mr. Knightley's family have owned the land in Highbury (since 1540), the roughly hundred years Emma's family have lived there but only rented their home on the Donwell estate, and the Coles, who have only recently purchased a home in Highbury. Regardless of the relative "fortune" of each family, the degree of land owned and the length of time the family has lived in the neighborhood weighs upon their status among their neighbors (534).

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however, to Miss Bates … she is only too good natured and too silly to suit me; but, in general, she is very much to the taste of everybody, though single and though poor"

(91). It takes a gross social faux-pas for Emma to realize that Miss Bates’ inner qualities, which she has underestimated, rate far higher in the community as a whole, than Emma’s class or status.

After Emma insults Miss Bates at the picnic on Box Hill by humiliating her in front of all their friends, Mr. Knightley’s reprimand summarizes concisely the nature of the relationship between Emma and Miss Bates. Mr. Knightley’s reprimand situations

Emma as Miss Bates’ “friend” and as a member of a community to whom she maintains responsibilities. His questions focus on Emma’s sympathetic relationships to other women within her community. He begins by demanding of Emma, “How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation” (407). Generally speaking, the term “situation” refers to one’s place in society, which is made up of birth, family connections, and fortune.

According to Delaney’s classifications, Mr. Knightley calls upon Miss Bates’ claim to

“status,” or her “tenure” in Highbury and her former place among a higher “class” of people, including themselves. However, I argue that in this case, Mr. Knightley expands this “axis” to include the combination of life circumstances that have influenced Miss

Bates’ happiness and her relationship with them as individuals. He identifies Emma’s deeper inability to connect with other women on grounds of equality, which she later identifies within herself as a failure to do “the duty of woman by woman” (249). Mr.

Knightley calls upon Emma’s “duty” as a woman to extend sympathy, not just her “duty” as a member of a higher class and one standing above Miss Bates in status. He asks

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Emma to look at Miss Bates as a whole person—to consider her place in both society and in the progress of her life:

‘Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation -- but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. … to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her -- and before her niece, too -- and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.’ (emphasis in original 408)

Austen’s description here includes more than a simple class- and status-based reversal of fortunes. Miss Bates’ “situation,” includes her life experience of losing her place in society, her comforts, and her family. Emma has all of these things and should, therefore, look on Miss Bates with “compassion” or sympathy at the idea of their loss.

Could she exercise her imagination to that end, she might behave very differently. Like

Austen’s call for womanly solidarity in Northanger Abbey, Austen suggests through Mr.

Knightley that Emma owes Miss Bates a degree of “protection and regard” based upon their likenesses rather than simply focusing on the single dimension of social status

(Northanger Abbey 30). In this context, egalitarian values infuse the heavily regimented structures of class and rank.

As one who lives both literally and figuratively at the center of the extended community of Highbury, Miss Bates represents sympathy and care far more than Emma can. Emma lives just outside of the town while Miss Bates lives at its center, keeping tabs on all her neighbors, which the reader knows through her endless prattle. Though boring, Miss Bates’ dialogue displays a genuine concern for all her neighbors. Austen’s choice to allow Miss Bates to be the source of Emma’s lesson on humility and sympathy

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seems fitting, for without this lesson, Emma might have found herself—wealthy or not— much closer to becoming like Miss Bates than she might have imagined, boring those around her with stories about her nieces, caring for her ailing father, and busy with the lives of others since she has no life of her own. In all the dinner parties she hosts, where her ailing father enjoys the company of the ailing, elder Mrs. Bates, Emma fails to make the connection between them. Without any change of situation, she too will end up spending “[h]er youth … and her middle of life … devoted to the care of a failing” parent, as Miss Bates does with her mother (20). At the critical juncture of the novel, and of

Emma’s life, she must choose. She might be “left in [the] solitary grandeur” of her estate; or she can enjoy the company of those who place greater value on “universal good will” (224, 20). By setting these values against one another—as they are embodied in two women—Austen makes a stronger argument for the “universal” application of non-hierarchical human values that she has been making in previous novels.

Austen utilizes the final chapter of the novel to focus on the ways Emma’s primary relationships change. As she resettles the women’s situations she explains the ways the dynamics of their friendships change. She spends the first half explaining the alterations in the intimacy between Emma and Harriet, which are the most substantial.

Given the complex relationships between class and fortune, Emma’s friendship with Harriet seems a bit confusing. Austen tells us that “[t]he intimacy between her and

Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner” (526-27). The suggestion of “what ought” to have been

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smacks of a kind of class snobbery that the rest of the novel works against. Why does

Mr. Knightley chastise Emma for treating Miss Bates as an inferior but also try to prevent Emma from raising Harriet to becoming accustomed to a higher acquaintance— essentially the same circle in which she and Miss Bates participate? Why does one barrier seem more fluid than the other?

Although a portion of the explanation for Miss Bates’ claims to Emma’s respect may rest in her prior “status,” Austen adds in the final chapter that even Harriet’s good character cannot make up for her questionable origins. To be a “natural daughter” with no clear place in the world makes Harriet a kind of wild card in the class system. When they uncover “the mystery of her parentage,” Austen makes the social taboo clear; for

Harriet to have married either Mr. Elton or Frank Churchill, “[t]he stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed” (526). As Mr.

Knightley made plain much earlier, “[m]en of family would not be very fond of connecting themselves with a girl of such obscurity” because they would “be afraid of the inconvenience and disgrace they might be involved in, when the mystery of her parentage came to be revealed”; Mr. Knightley knew early on that to “[l]et her marry

Robert Martin” would be to leave her “safe, respectable, and happy for ever (68).43

43 The nature of Harriet’s social status is complicated. I argued earlier that Mr. Knightley came to appreciate Harriet’s qualities in spite of his objections to Emma’s encouragement that she aspire to a match above her social status. Although Mr. Knightley first comments that “men of sense don’t want silly wives” when referring to the type of woman he assumes Harriet to be, he later tells Emma “Harriet Smith has some first-rate qualities … [She is] an unpretending, single-minded, artless girl—infinitely to be preferred by any man of sense and taste to such a woman as Mrs. Elton. I found Harriet more conversable than I expected (358). However, the issue of her questionable birth muddies the water here a bit. Mr. Knightley does admit to Emma that Harriet’s personality and manners are better than he originally thought, but his initial assessments were partially correct. Emma’s attempts to marry her off to a man of high rank while the possibility of finding out that she was an illegitimate child hung over her failed because most of the men were too mercenary or old fashioned to fall prey to Emma’s romantic notions. Frank Churchill’s marriage to Jane Fairfax, in spite of Jane’s slightly higher rank, does prove that Emma was not entirely wrong.

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Unlike Harriet, whose relationship with Emma receives extensive explanation,

Austen concludes Jane Fairfax’s story in a single sentence—one that sends Jane away from Highbury to await her marriage in the company of a former friend. Austen mentions no further intercourse between them; nor does she discuss the distance of travel between Emma’s and Jane’s relative estates after marriage, both of which generally follow when Austen wishes to imply an ongoing relationship. As Ruth Perry has pointed out, the “interrupted friendships” in Emma “signal that which is lost by women’s complicity in the marriage plot.” This is particularly true of Emma’s failed relationship with Jane Fairfax (192). Emma’s obsession with matchmaking throughout the novel keep her from pursuing egalitarian friendship. Austen’s commentary about Jane is an indictment of Emma’s actions toward her. The brevity of this closure reflects Emma’s cold refusals of Jane and the subsequent loss she will suffer.

Austen ends Emma with a frequently cited phrase that can easily be taken out of its surroundings to paint Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley in the idyllic colors of courtly love that his name evokes. To be left in “the perfect happiness of the union” is roughly the equivalent of living happily ever after (528). However, I’d like to note that Emma, in the context of the final chapter, lives in a very small world. Like Anne Elliot’s life before her marriage, Emma’s high rank seems to contract rather than expand her ability to create a circle of “true friends.” After all, Austen spends several chapters prior to this ending elaborating upon all of the losses of friendship Emma suffers, rounded out with a cold, harsh sentence that severs Emma’s budding friendship with Jane Fairfax. Instead,

Emma must be satisfied with “a small band of true friends,” and a series of unsatisfactory relationships, losses, and missed opportunities (emphasis mine 528).

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With Isabella in London, Harriet “necessarily drawn away by her engagements with the

Martins,” and Jane gone into another county; Emma is left with only Mrs. Elton, whose attentions she must studiously avoid, and Mrs. Weston, whose new baby must take up a great deal of her time (526). While Emma has gained one of the greatest heroes in literary history—who doesn’t want a Mr. Knightley?—Emma’s circle of female friends remains painfully small. Mr. Knightley is a catch, but only female friends can be there to keep her company during the long daytime hours when Mr. Knightley is busy managing

Donwell Abbey and its parish. The limitations surrounding Emma’s “perfect happiness” resemble Cecilia’s thwarted “schemes of happiness,” with the exception that Austen places more emphasis on women’s power to act for themselves, even in the midst of restricted social circumstances.

Women’s Friendship in the World

Although the parameters of Austen’s novels are often circumscribed within a small physical range of estates and attendant villages, her heroines’ worlds may be either expanded or contracted through their friendships and marriages. A woman’s sense and experience of ‘the world’ is in every way related to her home, surroundings, and the people attached to it through family and friendships. Austen’s novels foreground the importance of these relationships to women but, by placing them at the center of important social structures of marriage and estates, she highlights the ways they can be important to society.

Austen’s early novels (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) show women’s development as individuals, as well as refine the primary, unique qualities of women’s friendship and community. Emma’s contribution to Austen’s representation of women’s relationships can best be described as a portrait in the negative. Emma

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exhibits all the ways to not be a friend; she shows how not to behave, how not to nourish present bonds and potential future connections. Emma inhabits all the space around an empty cut out that tells us what friendship and women’s community could be.

Yet, the novel also presents a hopeful representation of an egalitarian marriage.

The hero—a man drawn metaphorically from ancient lines, in possession of an ancient estate—moves from the physical center of that estate to its perimeter in order to meet a woman who has made a full journey to individuation. Emma’s losses and failures in her female friendships and among the female community make her journey possible.

Additionally, the values represented by Mr. Knightley amount to a triumph of equality between men and women—at least what might be considered a substantial movement away from the patriarchal structures of its time. Austen does not achieve a modern feminist triumph but moves toward an eighteenth century sense of egalitarian humanism.

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CHAPTER 4 “PROTECTION AND REGARD”: PARATEXTS AND THE CREATION OF WOMEN’S LITERARY COMMUNITY

Few things perhaps are more difficult than to write a preface well, and it is perhaps equally true that no part of a book is so little read.

—Charlotte Smith Marchmont

Up to this point, I’ve been discussing the ways women writers developed female friendships within their novels in order to enter into discussions about larger social issues. Without losing this framework, I wish to focus for a time on the means by which these authors became active participants in their novels by treating their readers as intimate friends in imitation of the close female relationships in their stories, and by embedding intertextual markers of other women writers throughout their texts. 1 I see this trend as part of their ongoing construction of female friendship and the development of a broader sense of community, both as a concept and as a reality. Friendships among women, whether character to character, author to reader, or author to author, created a network of dialogue that expanded the definition of the novel. By expanding the novel, authors were able to influence the fluidity of spaces wherein women could speak. Women authors made particular use of the inherent ambiguity of prefatory materials to adopt a multi-vocal style, which allowed them greater dialectical liberties.

Many women writers vied for varying degrees of equality for all women through their

1 As mentioned in the introductory chapter, I am aware that singling women out in this way creates a superficial boundary, for women writers were certainly also addressing and responding to male authors and readers as well. Nonetheless, my focus here is on the moments and places when the writers singled out fellow women writers or addressed their women readers.

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texts, but the relationships they developed with their readers and with fellow women authors demonstrate some of their shared ideas and hopes, both for the genre and for women’s political agency. We see the first iterations of these ideas in the earlier writings of Frances Burney (Evelina [1778], Cecilia [1782]); Charlotte Smith (Elegiac Sonnets

[1784], Emmeline [1788]); and Maria Edgeworth (Letters for Literary Ladies [1795]). As more women wrote, ideas circulated and the opportunity for interaction increased exponentially. Edgeworth’s novels and later works, as well as Burney’s final work, The

Wanderer reflect social changes around the turn of the nineteenth century, including the scandal brought about by the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous Memoirs

(1798), which influenced the writing of every woman after it.2 Austen’s Northanger

Abbey functions as a framing device for these ideas, since it has the unique position of being composed in the eighteenth century (1798-99) but revised to its author’s satisfaction in the nineteenth (1816-17).3 This chapter will focus on the development of these concepts before they met the challenges that the Wollstonecraft scandal posed to women writers, their readers, and the community they hoped to achieve. The chapter following this one will pick up after the turn of the century as the changing social climate presented new challenges to this collective body.

2 In her accounting of Jane Austen’s connections with Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Kirkham discusses the social impact of the posthumous Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the publication of which she says resulted in “a time when open discussion of feminist ideas, however unexceptionable they might seem to modern readers, was almost impossible” (161). She describes the public response as a furious “anti-feminist backlash” (53). She argues further that Austen might have delayed the publication of First Impressions and chosen to revise it into Pride and Prejudice in part as a result of these social conditions.

3 I discuss my complete theories on the composition and revisions of Northanger Abbey in the final chapter. The dates mentioned here are consistent with those used by Jonathan Grossman in “Anne Elliot Bound Up in Northanger Abbey: The History of the Joint Publication of Jane Austen’s First and Last Novels.” Dierdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen A Family Record (1989, 2004) concurs with these dates. I discuss the relationship between the two novels and their joint revision in the Coda.

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Community through Friendship

Although some dynamic exists between any author and reader in every text, women writers of the eighteenth century, and particularly those I have singled out for this study, tended to take a personal approach – one that emphasized relationships, sympathetic connections, and intellectual equality. Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ exemplifies this approach. “Alas!” she exclaims, “If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” (30). In the passage, Austen risks jarring the reader out of the world of the novel in order to point for a moment at the mechanism of reading and the boundaries of the novel. She takes this risk in order to lay bare the possibilities available to women through the medium of the novel, and more specifically through the ties of women’s relationships. Austen places strongest emphasis on the necessity of solidarity between women; supporting one another is necessary for the good of all. Within this deceptively simple sentence, Austen suggests the presence of no fewer than five (5) participants in the act of reading a women’s novel. Austen, taking the role of rhetorical author

(participant 1), speaks to her rhetorical reader (partic. 2) about the heroine of her novel

(partic. 3), emphasizing the critical value of the heroine’s role as a reader. This gesture has the effect of drawing a parallel – based upon a sympathetic connection – between

Austen’s reader and her heroine. By creating this parallel, Austen also creates a strong implication that her primary audience is comprised of women. When the heroine of the first novel “patronizes” another, a second rhetorical author (partic. 4) enters the picture,

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followed by a second heroine (partic. 5) who is an object of the reading process.4

Between fictional heroines, Austen imagines an intertextual relationship that can provide

“protection and regard” in the midst of an antagonistic world where women’s virtue, value, intellect, and reputation is always in question (30). In response, Austen illuminates the potential for a network of friendships to emerge among multiple authors and readers, situated rhetorically in the same way as those in the novels—all based upon the values of sympathy, reason, and morality. The figures of the heroines, acting together, signify Austen’s full definition of women writers’ collective literary enterprise.

They are the embodiment of every participant in the act of reading – author, character, and reader. With a few concise strokes of the pen, Austen evokes a community of women whose relationships transform the seemingly closed parameters of the courtship novel into a living, permeable entity. In Austen’s imagining, the text, reader, and writer are bound together in the action of establishing a collective body, one that is constantly rewriting itself as it extends outside the world of the novel.

Another signature of women writers that I believe Austen exemplifies in this instance is the anticipation of understanding from her women readers, something reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser would later call the “implied reader,” or one who

“embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect— predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside, but by the text itself” (qtd. in

Goetch 189). It would be anachronistic to suggest that any writer of the eighteenth century would consider “the text itself” in the same light as Iser. Women writers of the

4 If we count the actual authors, we can add two more to that number, but I argue here and elsewhere that the concept of a “real” author cannot be established. Therefore, I have chosen to omit this avenue of investigation from this study.

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eighteenth century speak about “the novel” as a developing genre; they speak of “novel readers” together with “novel writers” as bound up in the struggle for legitimacy in what amounts to a series of culture and gender wars. In the “Preface” to Evelina, Frances

Burney dedicates her text “to the Public-for such, by novel writers, novel readers will be called” in spite of the potential disapproval that the critics may give it (7). Most of all, women writers would not and could not divorce themselves—as bodies or minds—from the idea of “the text itself” any more than they could from a wayward spouse.5 Just as they were considered to be the same person as their husband, so were their reputations completely bound up in their literary productions. Austen’s choice to focus on the heroine as patron rather than the author may give some insight into the authorial mindset that differs from that of modern theorists. Although she addresses her fellow authors, Austen’s choice to make the heroine the active agent in the exchange shows a conflation of author and character. Austen anticipates her audience’s understanding of the direct connection between authorial intent and the actions and choices of the

5 In The Law of Infancy and Coverture (1816), Peregrine Bingham sums up the concept of a married woman’s legal status in matters of law: “Married women are, by the law of England, subject, in matters of contract, to a greater disability even than infants; for the contracts of an infant are ... for the most part only voidable, while those of married women are, with few exceptions, absolutely void. … The disabilities … incident to coverture, are the simple consequence of that sole authority which the law has recognized in the husband … And why is this pre-eminence exclusively vested in the man?—Simply because he is the stronger. … It is always probably that the man, by his education and manner of life, has acquired more experience, more aptitude for business, and a greater depth of judgment than the woman” (161-2). The basis of a woman’s inability to bring suit against her husband or create any sort of contract to protect her own person or property originates in the idea that married persons are “according to the text of Littleton, being in law but one person, are on that account unable to contract with each other” (174). In regards to her rights as a wronged woman—Bingham tells us that even if “the husband turns his wife out of doors, on account of her having committed adultery under his roof. And although the husband be the aggressor by living in adultery with another woman, and though he turned his wife out of doors at a time when there was not any imputation on her conduct; yet if after she commit adultery, the husband is not bound to receive or support her; nor is he liable for necessaries which may have been provided for her after the crime” (173). In addition to the obvious double standard, one wonders at the specificity of such laws. Any mention of divorce in the entirety of this document alludes to the husband’s right to sue for divorce for a wife’s infidelity. As seen above, a husband’s infidelity has no legal ramifications.

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heroine. Such ideas have lost credence today, but a study of eighteenth century women writers must account for this literary and cultural construct in order to construe correctly the authors’ attempts at developing relationships with their readers

Reader response theory can give some dimension to our understanding of this approach to readership, particularly as it examines “the interaction of the text and the reader” (McCormick 67). Women writers understood and even developed through their works what Stanley Fish would later identify as “interpretive communities,” or subgroups of “readers [who] may assign a variety of meanings to any given text, because they are part of [a] language system” in which cultural and social meanings are shared

(McCormick 68)6. If we look at the second part of Austen’s extension of the world of the novel into and through the lives of her readers, she ties this action to a call for literary solidarity—one formed as a kind of defense mechanism against the vituperative press:

Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. (emphasis mine 30)

Sub-groups can be formed through a variety of circumstances, but certainly living as second-class citizens helped cement the bonds of potential sisterhood. Austen suggests that women writers oppose abusive language by forging their own language community, turning the inherent vulnerability of the physical conflation of their texts with their bodies into a collective, protective mechanism.

6 Among members of an interpretive community, certain agreements about meaning exist, through which “the formal features of texts are inter-subjectively verifiable rather than objective” (McCormick 68). According to Fish, “the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree” (Fish 338).

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Additionally, Austen’s description of the forces aligned against women, and women writers, underscores the embattled, socially circumscribed space of the novel.

For the most part, the eighteenth-century patriarchal view of the courtship novel required it to remain within rather narrow boundaries; if its authors wished to be seen as

“respectable,” the novel’s heroines, its plots, its morals, and its sentiments were expected, much like women themselves, to be delicate and free from impropriety. A critical part of this expectation included an implied understanding that women had no real influence in the world of letters and, as such, their novels should not intrude into it.

Women like Austen, Burney, Edgeworth, and Smith carefully worked around this expectation, both literally and figuratively. If the space of the novel was to remain

“private,” keeping women out of the public sphere, then women had to work hard to maintain a reputation of propriety while speaking to other women about agency and their potential for active participation in the world. They did so by developing a multi- vocal style of narrative and address, one that incorporates a shared language system and shared values, one designed for an audience upon whom they could rely to share an understanding of the unique situation of women. Kathleen McCormick has captured reader response theory’s shift from individual to communal in a way that explains quite nicely how I see eighteenth century women writers utilizing their readers’ interactions with their novels: “interpretive communities are made up of readers: the readers create its ideas, and they develop many of their ideas about texts and about reading through reading” (emphasis in original 71). As McCormick emphasizes, the point of action—the nexus—can be found in the intertextual experience that builds in and through both text and community. No single text or reader can account for the collective process of

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meaning making. Above all, eighteenth century women writers became a catalyst for action and change in the community of readership and in the movements toward women’s intellectual agency.

The mechanisms these authors used to achieve these goals can be found within their use of the ambiguous status of the novel, which managed to mimic the permeable and contested boundaries of public and private society. The increase in printed materials in the eighteenth century gave the book the somewhat contradictory position of being widely circulated as well as having a more intimate presence in private homes and in individual minds. The space of a novel is a study in contradictions, since the rhetorical construct of an author/reader relationship creates the illusion of privacy; yet each reader knows the same book is read by others. As such, the act of reading remains paradoxically both public and private. Women writers made use of the status of the novel to create a public, rhetorical, and multi-vocal dialogue that traversed this space with minimal controversy.

The Paratext as Instrument of Change

The first area of permeability is the Prefatory space, which stands as a threshold between the inside world of the book and the outside world of the reader. The outside world is made up of everything that occupies the reader’s focus prior to opening the book, including the physical space they inhabit and the abstract regions of the mind. In the first pages of a book, the reader’s focus shifts inward, engaging in the dialogue presented by a physically absent author. In this space, whether an author chooses to include any type of prefatory materials (preface, introduction, dedication, or epigram) no clear boundaries exist. According to Gerard Genette, “more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is rather a threshold, or – a word Borges used apropos of a preface

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– a ‘vestibule’ … a zone without any hard and fast boundary” (2). The complex mechanism of reading makes it impossible to mark the moment at which a reader crosses over completely into the world of the text. For the novel, an author’s choice to add his/her voice to the text invariably gestures toward its artifice—its fictional nature.

Yet most eighteenth and nineteenth century authors took advantage of the prefatory space to append their voice onto their text. The inclusion of such materials indicates a conscious engagement with the audience, as well as an intentional attempt to demarcate the entry point of the novel.7 As Genette puts it, the paratext is “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” used by an author to influence public perception (2). In spite of the gesture toward fictionalization, women authors overwhelmingly used their prefaces to appear as ‘themselves’—or rather a publicly acceptable version thereof. In comparison, while plenty of male authors also appear as

‘themselves,’ in prefaces, they tended to depersonalize their authorial voice, showing more concern for the perceived role of authority afforded an author than what the public might think of their personality.

Genette locates within paratexts three types of “senders” of the messages conveyed through these texts. In spite of his blindness to the dynamic of gender,

Genette definition can still be relevant to the prefatory movements of women writers. 8

7 Authors in the eighteenth century wrote prefaces for a variety of genres, but I focus here primarily on novels. The only exception is my use of the successive prefaces to Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, which I use in part to discuss rhetorical strategies and in part to contrast with the later prefaces to her novels.

8 In her discussion of the prefaces of eighteenth-century novels by women, Katharina Rennhak makes use of Genette, and she likewise notes that his structures are problematically “gender-neutral” (58). She finds that women authors, in their prefaces, blend the roles of “authorial” and “actorial,” while men like Richardson and Defoe “invest most of their prefatory energy in emphasizing the authenticity of their stories” (90).

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First, an “alleged author of a preface” can be “authorial,” which Genette implies somewhat problematically represents the actual or real author; next, the author can be

“actorial” by speaking as a character in the text; and finally, an author can be

“allographic,” and appear as “a wholly different (third) person,” an option which Genette presents rather vaguely as a catch-all of other fictive personas (178-9).9 I find Genette’s concept of the “authorial” voice problematic because I consider the concept of a ‘real’ author an inherently faulty one. Any authorial voice is constructed by the text and, as such, endlessly referential. I argue that any reference to authorial intent relates to a rhetorically constructed authorial voice that can be located (to an admittedly finite extent) within the text; this voice and its perceived intent are also limited by the context of the culture in which the text was written. In my review of the prefatory materials of women writers of the long eighteenth century, I find authorial voices carefully crafted in order to achieve a sense of authenticity and authority that is distinctly female and that speaks in specific ways to female audiences.10 Where the male author can assume the authority inherent in the authorial voice, a woman must first establish her right to appear in the public role of an author before she can claim any of its power.

Examples of the assumed masculine authorial voice abound. As early as 1748,

Samuel Richardson felt no scruples about dictating the terms of Clarissa to “the public”—without apology, without any need to develop any sense of himself as any other than a natural authority on “human nature” (“Preface” iv).

9 Genette only classifies these types; he does not speculate as to the authors’ reasons or the potential ramifications of such choices.

10 Here I intentionally use the terms as they would be understood in the eighteenth century. Part of the argument I set out here depends upon the idea that women authors sought to distinguish their writing, and themselves, as deserving of recognition as female Authors on the same footing as male Authors.

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Different persons, as might be expected, have been of different opinions, in relation to the conduct of the Heroine in particular situations; and several worthy persons have objected to the general catastrophe, and other parts of the history. Whatever is thought material of these shall be taken notice of by way of Postscript, at the conclusion of the History; for this work being addressed to the public as a history of life and manners, those parts of it which are proposed to carry with them the force of an example, ought to be as unobjectionable as is consistent with the design of the whole, and with human nature. (iv)

In this unapologetic manner, Richardson dismisses the idea that his readers might object to any part of his novel before they ever enter its pages.

In contrast, though Charlotte Lennox had already published a successful collection of poems and one novel, 11 she prefaced The Female Quixote (1752) with a timid and personal appeal to the patronage of The Earl of Middlesex. She speaks of “the

Dread which a Writer feels of the Public Censure; the still greater Dread of Neglect; and the eager wish for Support and Protection” in reference to the book as a whole and her right to present it (1). Lennox’s tone of anxiety registers on an entirely different scale than Richardson’s. She does not feel she can address the finer points of plot or the conventions of the genre; she still feels “Dread” in equal portions that she will either be chastised or ignored by the public (1). Considering the public praise and the notice Dr.

Johnson gave Lennox after her poems were known, both options seem implausible. He is reported to have placed her talent in company with Hannah More and his darling

Fanny Burney (“Lennox” 2). To celebrate the publication of her first novel, The Life of

Harriet Stuart (1751), Johnson held a party in her honor because she was “an authoress” and invented a ceremony in which he “invoked the muses” before setting a

11 Poems on Several Occasions, Written by a Lady (London: S. Paterson, 1747) and The Life of Harriot Stuart: Written by Herself, 2 vols (London: J. Payne, 1751).

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crown of laurel on her head (qtd. in Gallager 146). Even with the ‘protection’ of a great literary power like Johnson, Lennox still felt the social oppression of her gender when she placed herself before the public in print. Her first line of defense, so to speak, is the rhetorical portrait she paints of herself in her Preface, and the subsequent connection she makes with her various audience members as she does so. Over twenty years after

The Female Quixote, Frances Burney echoes Lennox’s mixed “Dread,” in her “Preface” to Evelina, as she describes in its pages, “with a very singular mixture of timidity and confidence … trembling for their success from a consciousness of their imperfections”

(7). Burney, however, “fears not being involved in their disgrace, while happily wrapped up in a mantle of impenetrable obscurity,” which perhaps illustrates most clearly the situation of women writers. Burney’s ability to spend a great deal of her “Preface” discussing, like Richardson, stylistic choices and the conventions of the novel, relies a great deal on her anonymity. Burney poses to the reader her “plan” for her text, as both rationale and lesson—“To draw characters from nature, though not from life, and to mark the manners of the times, is the attempted plan of the following letters” (Evelina 7).

This prefatory voice speaks with a recognizable authority, one replaced by an apologetic tone that will color the prefaces written after her authorship is known.

The use of Genette’s fictional, or “actorial,” prefatory voice remained largely within the genre of (historical) Romance and was used, for the most part, by men and women writers of that genre. Romances seemed to operate under slightly different rules, for Anne Radcliffe utilized the same style of fictional preface in The Italian that

Walter Scott did in his Waverley novels. The prefatory spaces of Romance tended to function as plausible historical markers, constructed to lend a sense of authenticity to

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the tales themselves.12 However, when Radcliffe published a text outside the genre of

Romance, essentially appearing as ‘herself’ in print, the rules immediately reverted to those applied to women in general. In her Preface to A journey made in the summer of

1794, through Holland and the western frontier of Germany (1795),13 Radcliffe takes great pains to maintain a sense of propriety. Like many of her sister novelists, Radcliffe refers to authorship as a “mode of appearing before the Public,” and carefully explains that although some of the topics she addresses may be unbecoming a woman, they are not her own. She has been accompanied on her journey by her “nearest relative and friend,” her husband, and “where the economical and political conditions of countries are touched upon in the following work, the remarks are less her own than elsewhere”

(v). Radcliffe’s reticence can be explained in part when considered alongside Charlotte

Smith’s 1792 statement at the end of her Preface to the sixth edition of the Elegiac

Sonnets “that for Woman – ‘the post of Honor is a Private station’” (xii). Where Scott’s novels, though Romances, contained plenty of political commentary, he was in no real danger of being discovered as an anonymous author. Essentially, Scott’s gender allowed him to be whimsical in his narrative choices for his “General Preface to the

Waverley Novels.” Compared to Scott, women writers in the same genre tended to

12 Scott’s Waverley was meant to be part of Scotland’s historical past. He wrote the original “General Preface to the Waverley Novels” as a completely (and rather obviously) fictional character. He opens with the following address to the reader, which takes advantage of the form of this convention to bolster the sense of historical veracity of his tale: “Having undertaken to give an Introductory Account of the compositions which are here offered to the public, with Notes and Illustrations, the Author, under whose name they are now for the first time collected, feels that he has the delicate task of speaking more of himself and his personal concerns than may perhaps be either graceful or prudent” (np).

13 The complete, rather unwieldy title to this work is A journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland and the western frontier of Germany, with a return down the Rhine: to which are added Observations during a tour to the lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland.

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approach their paratextual materials more pragmatically in order to control the audience’s readings of both their texts and themselves.

This pragmatism did not prevent them, however, from weighing in on important issues and working toward women’s equality. Smith’s comment at the end of her

Preface to the Elegiac Sonnets does not refer to “the post of” an Authoress—a term that many women writers used for themselves—but “the post” of Woman. Here, as elsewhere, when Smith speaks for herself, she speaks for all women. Genette explains further this inclusion of specific audience members by arguing that the presence of a paratext implies a demand for the reader to consider how, “limited to the text alone and without a guiding set of directions,” he or she would interpret the text (2). Genette’s imperative for the reader to isolate “the text alone” bears a striking resemblance to Iser’s

“the text itself”; however, Genette’s focus on the intervention of an author resituates the balance struck between eighteenth century women authors and their readers. In his consideration of “addressees,” or readers, Genette begins to see the possibility for a dual audience. He recognizes one reader, or “ultimate addressee,” who serves as a kind of surrogate for another specific or “privileged reader,” and who “has no difficulty sorting things out and receiving what—through the third party or over the third party’s shoulder—is quite obviously meant exclusively for him” (8, 9). However, both critics omit the only clear line of demarcation in an otherwise fluid space; an active author, moving within the porous boundary of public and private, who must “always [be] a rhetorical figure” (Dunn 11). An author creates an identity through which to negotiate a relationship with the reader by the careful use of this rhetorical, authorial voice.

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The goal of women’s rhetorical authorial voices remains grounded in the creation of community with their readers. In their prefatory materials, authors such as Burney,

Smith, and Edgeworth created multiple voices that addressed multiple audiences simultaneously, one of which was the sub-group of women readers.14 As they did so, they defined and shaped an active, communal readership. Although their methods varied according to time and situation, they shared the goal of shaping the genre of the novel to expand the reach of women’s voices and to use it as a vehicle of change for women’s agency.

Frances Burney’s Many Voices and Long Life

Perhaps the reason Austen cited Frances Burney as one of the most influential women authors of her generation, and as a prime example of one whose voice counteracted those who condemned women’s novels, was that she saw in her addresses to her audience and in her works the kind of community that Austen herself embraced. Burney’s long life—and the lengthy career it afforded her—makes her works a good study in the developments and shifts in the ways women authors interacted with their various audiences.

Burney’s prefaces, particularly viewed within the context of her career, present a series of complex and intriguing examples of the way women writers adopted a multi- vocal approach to authorship in order to negotiate the male-dominated world of literature while also communicating with their female audiences. Her prefatory materials

14 Renhak likewise cites fellow scholar Cheryl Nixon’s assessment that women authors’ tendencies to focus on the both authorial and actorial voices contributes to the formation of “community” between an author and her readers (60). Her examples come largely from early eighteenth century texts. She characterizes the voices of women authors in these situations as mimicking the voices of the characters in their stories.

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reflect cultural expectations of all eighteenth century women writers while also showing how a brilliant wordsmith could address multiple audiences within a single text. The prefatory materials of her first novel, Evelina (1778) differ in tone, length, and even volume from those of the novels that follow it; and we must look to the circumstances of the novel’s publication, Burney’s gender, and the literary marketplace to understand fully the choices she made for it, and why her choices changed throughout her career.

Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778) presents a fascinating combination of three prefatory paratexts, ordered as such: a “Dedicatory Poem: To ------”; an “Original

Dedication to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews”; and a “Preface” addressed to her readers. Even before Burney developed any secure relationship with her readers, her prefatory materials show a desire to establish one, and a confidence in the figure of the reader that supersedes the relationship with the literary establishment.

As an unpublished author, such confidence can only come from her experiences as a member of a reading community. She establishes herself from the opening pages as a sympathetic narrative voice. Burney’s choice of order suggests that she is taking care of her filial duty first, dismissing the literary establishment second, and then addressing her

‘true’ audience last. From outside to inside, this sets the reader as ‘insider’ – the most important participant in the process – and one who can connect with the author as a fellow reader. Burney therefore establishes herself as a member of the community of her own readers.

The outer ‘shell’ of the novel appeals to the audience’s affinity for domestic duties and loyalties, a trait that does credit to either a male or female author. Since Burney published Evelina anonymously, the earnestness of the dedicatory poem to her father

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is somewhat overshadowed by the idea that it also serves as a kind of insurance policy for the day when he will discover that she has published the novel without consulting him. 15 She navigates her covert publication of Evelina rather adeptly by claiming that doing so prevents any failure on her part from staining his public reputation:

“Concealment is the only boon I claim;/ Obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse,/ Who cannot raise, but would not sink, thy fame” (1). Since her father had an established reputation as a published doctor and music historian, she flatters his vanity and attempts to deflect any anger he might evince at her lack of proper respect; after all, her

“filial love” and devotion should have compelled her to ask his permission to publish her work. To her secondary audience – the general public – she positions herself as a proper lady who plays the role of a dutiful daughter (should her identity be revealed).

The image of this child, who might be male or female in the original printing, can only soften the reception of the public. In truth, her anonymity renders the narrator in this poem gender-neutral; “filial love” can refer to a daughter or a son and, in fact, nowhere in the three prefatory texts does she disclose her gender.16 She says everything—some would argue to excess—a loving, devoted son or daughter should say, from attributing to him her “love of virtue” to praising his life as the ultimate example of his “good works”

15 The reader can safely assume that the writer addresses a father since in line 10 she refers to her “filial love,” placing the addressee as a parent and in the opening line of the poem she calls him the “Author of my being,” which strongly suggests an almost god-like masculine figure (pp). The OED’s second entry for the term ‘author’ as “the Creator” makes use of several eighteenth and nineteenth century literary examples that echo Burney’s phrasing throughout the first stanza: “1714 J. Addison Spectator No. 571. ‘The great Author of Nature.’ 1853 F. W. Robertson Serm. (1872) 3rd Ser. iv. 55 ‘The Father the Author of our being ... He is the Author of all life.’” Failing any other more direct evidence, Burney openly dedicated The Wanderer to her father and refers back to the poem in Evelina, saying it was for him.

16 My view is that she wrote the Prefatory materials in a way that allowed for gender-neutrality at the time of publication but that maintained the decorum expected of a “proper” lady anticipating the time that her authorship became known.

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(1). However, Burney’s combination of self-deprecation with praise of the party to whom the writing is addressed is a staple of eighteenth century women’s writing. Her deployment of this technique serves to direct her readers toward a reception of her work that would be most agreeable to her purposes. Burney takes full advantage of the temporal nature of anonymous publishing, taking the chance that it may sink into oblivion or it may find acceptance, in which case she will have to answer to her father.

In the face of these real fears, she capitalizes on her rhetorical role as an obedient child to supplement the second and third paratexts.

Burney displays a striking ability to take multiple rhetorical positions as she moves on to address the critics and the public respectively. Within these spaces her women readers can experience an insider’s feeling of amusement, moral support, and affirmation. When she shifts to the “Original Dedication to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews,” Burney chooses deeply ambiguous language for her multi-tonal attack on a pointedly male literary establishment. She addresses them collectively as

“Gentlemen” in the salutation. In the meantime, Burney implies that she is a male author, but a closer reading shows that she does not reveal her gender. In fact, the closer one reads, the more confusing her gender references become, for she refers to

Authors (with a capital ‘A’) using masculine pronouns, but takes care to avoid using any gendered pronouns when speaking of herself. Her tone wavers between flattery and mockery. On the surface, she characterizes herself as a woman should; she takes a submissive posture, openly acknowledging her lesser status in the literary world, while asking for the protection of the male-dominated presses. However, in addressing this body “jointly …to mark the generous sentiments by which liberal criticism … ought to be

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distinguished,” Burney manipulates the power they attempt to wield by turning their words against them (5). After all, reminding them what they “ought” to do publicly essentially maneuvers them into a position where they must do what she has suggested or lose credibility. She begins by taking the part of the unambitious fledgling author and appeals to the “Gentlemen”—a role that brings its own set of established behaviors— with a value-laden question: “Without name, without recommendation, and unknown alike to success and disgrace, to whom can I so properly apply for patronage, as to those who publicly profess themselves Inspectors of all literary performances?” (3). As in Evelina, the speaker of this dedication sets herself against the reviewers in a way that forces them either to be kind or to appear ungentlemanly. Using the same technique, she declares in a tone of utter confidence (is it sincerity or sarcasm?)—“your examination will be alike unbiassed by partiality and prejudice;— no refractory murmuring will follow your censure, no private interest will be gratified by your praise”

(4). A few paragraphs earlier, Burney designates them “magistrates of the press, and

Censors for the public” (emphasis mine 3). Compared to her relative humility, the reviewers appear hopelessly arrogant. By characterizing them in this way, she empowers the public, giving them the chance to scorn the critics, join together as a group, and feel a sense of superiority over the “magistrates of the press,” who now work for them.

This final appeal to the public serves as Burney’s sharpest blow, where she points almost menacingly to the powerlessness of the critical voice. Although she couches her point in the language of duty, she reminds them of the reality of the market,

“Your engagements are not to the supplicating authors; but to the candid public, which

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will not fail to crave ‘The penalty and forfeit of your bond’” (4). Her allusion to Shylock’s bloody demand for a pound of flesh could not be a more explicit metaphor. The court of public opinion is the one that matters. She may be a ‘nobody’ to them, but if the public buys her books, the voice or word of the critical press—their bond—loses its value.

Such sinister overtones, combined with her mocking subservience to their importance, belie the overall supplicating tone of the “Original Dedication to the Authors of the

Monthly and Critical Reviews.” By the end of this dedication, Burney has paved the way for her address to the public. She dismisses the critics from the conversation about to take place between herself and her readers, showing that their opinions and arrogance render them out of touch with the experience of reading novels. She pushes them out while inviting her readers in, making them feel that they are members of a privileged community—that they, and not the critics, have the power to understand what lies within.

To underscore any doubt about her true intentions for the novel, Burney gives her final address in the form of a “Preface” to her readers: “[t]he following letters are presented to the Public-for such, by novel writers, novel readers will be called,-with a very singular mixture of timidity and confidence” (“Preface” 7). This “mixture of timidity and confidence” may or may not be contrived, since the aforementioned dual expectations of women authors existed on all levels of society. In either case, she claims no such confidence in her “Dedication to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical

Reviews,” choosing instead a false bravado, which seems to play rather to her audience with a wink and a nod—an inside joke with them. The “Preface,” however speaks more in earnest and focuses on what she believes her audience expects of her. Burney’s

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confidence in her readers – particularly bold for a writer with no prior reputation – shows her understanding of the nature of readership. Although she was not an established writer, she knew what it was to be a reader, and she knew the power that the reading public had in determining the true value of novels. From her experiences among her father’s various acquaintances, she understood that while other genres may have been the purview of experts, the novel answered to the public.

Burney plays repeatedly with the idea that though society says that “Authors” are men, the Novel is a decidedly feminine genre, bound up in the expectation that the best novels should be written for moral instruction. Burney caters to these assumptions with wry wit, demonstrating her awareness of the place of the novel—the production of the female pen—in general society. She does so by poking fun at the presumed audience of the novel, claiming, as if in passing, that if boarding school girls are going to read novels anyway, they might as well be given something unobjectionable:

Perhaps, were it possible to effect the total extirpation of novels, our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular, might profit from their annihilation; but since the distemper they have spread seems incurable, […] surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged than contemned. (8)

With this statement, she stakes claim to the established ground of the “Moral Tale.” Yet a statement like this might be read in more than one light, particularly in regard to gender. On a literal level, Burney pays homage to the dominant patriarchal opinion of novels and young women so that anyone who holds such opinions can find nothing amiss. However, a woman who enjoys reading novels—whether she is a “boarding- school damsel” or is just being treated like one—may well consider this statement within the context of the whole “Preface” and see its underlying irony. After all, the novel to

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which this “Preface” is attached tells the story of a young woman whose private education included novels. Much like Austen’s tongue-in-cheek discussions of novel readers in Northanger Abbey, the tone of the author makes a great difference in the determination of meaning. Austen’s sarcasm is apparent; Burney’s is less so, although her playful exaggeration of the “distemper” of the novel becoming an incurable illness certainly hints at it. Like much of the “Dedication to the Authors of the Monthly and

Critical Reviews,” ambiguous language gives her statements about women’s education and authorship the potential for more meaning than is immediately apparent.

After skillfully carving out a place for her novel as a proper “moral tale,” Burney quickly turns from this idea to place herself within a different tradition. She does so by mentioning several authors—all men of course—and professing a sort of canonical lineage through their influence. Borrowing the language of literary criticism, Burney humbly aspires not to possess but to imitate their “knowledge,” “eloquence,” “pathetic powers,” “wit,” and “humour” (9).17 She doesn’t stop there, though; she claims more ground by adding that “though they have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers, and though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren” (9). As a writer, then, she implies that she will enrich the novel by enhancing it with feminine traits; Johnson, Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet have done nicely, she seems to say, but it’s time to let a woman take the pen and bring the page to life (9). On this note, she invites her more observant readers to look at the finer details of her novel

17 Margaret Anne Doody has argued that Burney’s anxiety in the “Ode” to her father represents a somewhat disingenuous desire to apologize for engaging in what she perceived as “shameful fiction writing”; at the same time Doody considers Evelina “Frances’ elopement, her rebellion, her declaration of independence” (39). I extend this argument to her subject matter.

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with an eye to the differences between the masculine and feminine narratives of courtship. For a certain community of readers—the interpretive community of portions of her women readers—some of her language will stand out as a special sort of dialogue directed toward them. By framing the novel in this manner, Burney demonstrates an implicit trust in her readers’ ability to read between the lines of Evelina’s letters. She anticipates that they will understand both text and subtext without needing overt explanations.

The opening materials in Cecilia (1782), Burney’s next novel, and those of

Evelina could not be more different. The writer of the Preface of Cecilia had experienced the overwhelming interlude of instant fame; she had been outed as the author of Evelina; and she’d heard a variety of responses, positive and negative, public and private. Perhaps the younger writer of Evelina felt a bit more daring—certainly more verbose—behind the veil of anonymity. Notably, Burney addressed the preface of

Cecilia to “the Public,” toward whom she displays cautious but sincere gratitude for the generous support of her first novel (3). In contrast to the multiple entries in Evelina,

Cecilia contains a single and relatively short “Advertisement.” Where the author of

Evelina seems to play with authorship—revel in it, even—the author of Cecilia is somber and earnest. Several factors may have contributed to such a dramatic change.

Understanding the ways her relationships changed during this time gives particular resonance to Burney’s altered tone, as well as her choice to address her audience alone.

The four year interval between Evelina and Cecilia calls into question the influence of outside forces on Burney’s voice. As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, the

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composition and then suppression of her comic play, The Witlings, birthed the tragic novel that spoke to her readers, as well as numerous women writers in years to come.

The suppression of this play represents the silencing of many women authors. It shows precisely the places a “proper” woman’s voice could speak and where it could not in the decades prior to the turn of the century.

Playwriting was intrinsically problematic for women writers. Eighteenth century comedic plays required burlesque and relied upon a certain degree of sexual humor, something that male writers could get away with because their knowledge of sexuality was unexceptionable (Doody 77).18 Women playwrights were caught between the danger of ruining their reputations by revealing the knowledge required to construct comedic conceits and the desire to enter a field rendered a ‘higher’ form of literature because men dominated it.19 While drama and tragedy were options, Burney had a gift for comedy, which Johnson confirmed. In the end, Burney could not avoid being caught in this double bind of gender and genre. She could not avoid the direct connection society drew between what women could say publicly and privately based upon their

18 Doody explains further, “[Burney] wanted to make people laugh; she believed that she could be funny, despite being a lady. She was funny—and that wrecked her dramatic prospects more thoroughly than anything else could have done” (77). Burney’s early works attest to her penchant for comedy. Her turn in Cecilia to a blend of comedy with tragedy, I believe, can be explained in part by her struggle with the suppression of her comedic genius. Cecilia is oppressed on all sides, full of potential and yet stymied in every chance of happiness. Cecilia’s tragedy is entirely social. I see this as an extension of Burney’s awakening—the “good morning Miss Fanny Burney” to a world in which even the most sought after talent and promising ‘wit’ cannot see the light of day, but must instead have a curtain closed on her in a darkened theater, sight unseen.

19Garrick’s Prologue for Hannah More’s tragedy Percy – for she did not attempt any comedy – shows the expectation of women at the outset of a work: “Though I am female, and the rule is ever/ For us, in Epilogue, to beg your favour” (qt in Doody 75). Garrick, speaking on behalf of More, recognizes the need for women to make apology for their entry into the dramatic scene. Perhaps because he is a man, he can make the bolder statement that he knows she would make that More makes her entry in the name of women’s claims to reason, an argument which he begins for her in his preface: “I come, the friend and champion of my sex:/ The men, who grant not much, allow us charms—/ Are eyes, shapes, dimples, then our only arms?” (qt. in Doody 75).

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knowledge of the world; “an unmarried virgin [should not] seem to know too much, though as a member of the audience she was permitted to laugh at sexual escapades”

(Doody 72-3). On the page, such things could be left to the imagination and much could be implied without risking one’s reputation. The only safe place for women writers was in a morally sound novel. 20

Burney’s letter to Mr. Crisp in 1779 after the suppression of the play utilizes the same kind of doublespeak evident throughout the prefatory materials of Evelina. The stated purpose of this letter is to thank him for his “censure” of the play, since he has spared her potential embarrassment. She begins by whimsically wishing the characters of her play a hearty “good night! good night!” as she acknowledges that “there are plays to be saved,” but hers is one of the “plays that are not to be saved” (Diaries and Letters np). She follows up with what should be an equally chipper “good morning, Miss Fanny

Burney!” that, however, takes a darker tone given the subject matter; she declares mockingly to a newly sobered self—“I hope you have opened your eyes for some time, and will not close them in so drowsy a fit again” (np). Much like the “Dedication to the

Monthly and Critical Reviewers,” Burney’s self-deprecation is really a veiled accusation.

In this case, her blend of playfulness and solemnity creates a tone of silent chastisement toward Crisp for his role in bringing her to the bitter place of worldly

20 Mr. Crisp summarized Burney’s dilemma in a letter while she was working through her drafts:

A great deal of management and dexterity will certainly be requisite to preserve spirit and salt, and yet keep up delicacy; but it may be done, and you can do it if anybody. Do you remember, about a dozen years ago, how you used to dance Nancy Dawson on the grass-plot, with your cap on the ground, and your long hair streaming down your back, one shoe off, and throwing about your head like a mad thing? Now you are to dance Nancy Dawson with fetters on; there is the difference. (qtd.in Doody 73)

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knowledge, of losing what she wanted dearly for the sake of propriety. Her letter hints that she doubts the danger to her reputation, even as she pays homage to his advice:

“As to all you say of my reputation and so forth, I perceive the kindness of your endeavours to put me in humour with myself, and prevent my taking huff, which, if I did,

I should deserve to receive, upon any future trial, hollow praise from you,—and the rest from the public” (np). This last thrust is most telling. If she learned nothing else from her first encounter with the public, it was that her sense of their taste was accurate and her rejection of the critics was equally valid. Navigating the opinions of those closest to her proved more complicated. Her letters show that she continued to doubt the well- meaning advice of her father and Mr. Crisp because she received such strong encouragement from some of the great literary minds of the times.

Further evidence of her developing sense of herself as an author and her relationship with the public can be seen in the original, unpublished, introduction to

Cecilia, in which she discusses her trust of the public, and her trust in herself to be a judge of public opinion. Throughout this much longer version, Burney seems to be wrestling against the advice of her father, in favor of her own instincts about her readers, and the opinion of other professionals who encouraged her. No doubt the sheer number of voices speaking to her was overwhelming. Burney’s sense of confusion at the overabundance of intrusive opinions is echoed in Cecilia, a novel in which a young woman, with “little knowledge of fashionable manners and of the characters of the times” is driven mad as the people around her vie for her wealth without considering her happiness (Evelina 8).21

21 Evelina is also “a young female, educated in the most secluded retirement, makes, at the age of seventeen, her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life; with a virtuous mind, a cultivated

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Burney spends nearly all of the space of the original preface to Cecilia discussing the author’s relationship to an abstract public. She burdens this preface with a cumbersome series of interactions between personified virtues and vices—Vanity,

Truth, Genius, Ignorance, Merit, Industry, Indolence, and so on—in a convoluted effort to discuss her transition from Evelina to Cecilia. By setting her final point up through such a lengthy abstraction, she holds her readers at arm’s length. Perhaps her realization of this effect caused her to make the changes she did, as the revised preface is about one-fourth the length of the original. The contents of the end of the original are the only bits that remain. What does come through in the original preface, however, is

Burney’s confusing journey as an author who wishes to pursue “Truth” and “Genius” while being distracted by fame, praise, and flattery. Although she attempts to wrangle this herd of characters into a proper moral tale, her truer instinct as a growing realist— which becomes evident in Cecilia—resists this tendency. In the latter portion of the preface she shifts her focus inward, opening herself to her readers on a personal level in a way that allows them to sympathize with her. She admits to her confusion and describes “the interior movements by which [she] might be compelled” and to “the intricasies of the human Heart,” which can be as “various as innumerable, and its feelings … minute and complex, as to baffle all the power of Language” (945). Rather than instructing them to read the novel on her terms, she entrusts her readers to

“severally determine for themselves” what to think of it; she decides with confidence that

“to their decisions [she] must, perforce, submit” (945). As such, her original preface

understanding, and a feeling heart, her ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners of the world” (“Preface” 7).

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reflects her personal journey through the many voices that have intruded themselves into her writing process. She seems to realize in the end that the text, as she sends it to its destination, belongs to her and her readers.

The published preface speaks to this amended message, since she decided to scrap the first in favor of a much shorter one that left no hints of this time of artistic upheaval. All that remains is a message of thanks to her readers for the “indulgence” they showed to Evelina, and an admission that the “animation of success … has encouraged its Author to risk this second attempt” (3). While many women authors spent this space apologizing for having the boldness to both be a woman and appear in print, Burney merely explains that the “universally acknowledged” success of Evelina would make her appear conceited if she attempted anything of the sort (3).

This opening can be viewed in several lights. First, it can be seen in terms of its omissions, the most glaring of which is that lack of mention of her father, who was in

Evelina the “Author of her being.” Considering the public discovery of her authorship, and her father’s heavily guarded public reputation, this could be considered a snub.

Instead, the first line describes Evelina as “unpatronized, unaided, and unowned,” which underscores Burney’s singular efforts in the creation of the novel (3). Cecilia’s authorial voice conveys an abbreviated surety that the great success of her first novel had nothing to do with those around her.

Second, when Burney references the two novels, she conflates the books themselves with their title characters, and discusses their interactions with the public in the way that Evelina’s subtitle suggests, as “a young lady’s entrance into the world.” In the last line of the “Advertisement” to Cecilia, she “sends Cecilia into the world with

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scarce more hope, though far more encouragement, than attended her highly-honoured predecessor, Evelina” (Cecilia 3). This idea might have come inadvertently from her interactions with Johnson, who paid her the high complement of speaking of the characters in her novels as though they were real people. She considered this a compliment because “it seemed to justify the Character, as being Natural” (Journals and

Letters 95). As an author and critic, Johnson admires this as realism. For Burney, this marks the achievement of the goal she set in Evelina to create a “heroine [who is]

…young, artless, and inexperienced … the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire” with whom her audience can relate (Evelina 8). When she speaks directly to her audience about the characters in this manner, she breaks down the barrier between fiction and reality in the service of the same idea and she invites them to participate in Cecilia’s story with her. Since they allowed Evelina into their “world,” she hopes they will “indulge” Cecilia in the same manner. At the invitation of this authorial voice, author, character, and audience enter the book together in a bond of friendship. Although the “Advertisement” to Cecilia can be seen as evidence of the deep hurt Burney felt at the loss of The Witlings, it also demonstrates Burney’s growing faith in herself as a writer and the strengthening bond between herself and her readers. The

“Advertisement” is proof of her faith in her readers to “determine for themselves” what to make of her lengthy novel. Cecilia’s overwhelming success suggests that its audience felt a determined connection with both its characters and author.

The long fourteen years between the publication of Cecilia (1782) and Camilla

(1796) remains somewhat mysterious to her biographers. Burney’s movements can be accounted for, but her reasons for ceasing to write are less clear, rendering her rather

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enigmatic dedication “To the Queen” and “Advertisement” yet another study in omissions rather than expressions. For the first few years after the publication of

Cecilia, Burney enjoyed the immense celebrity its popularity afforded her, traveling with friends and family and expanding her acquaintance. Her primary biographer Margaret

Doody argues that at least a year or so of this silence was a result of Burney’s belief that a man named George Cambridge was courting her and that “if [she] felt that she might soon marry, she might well have felt it inappropriate to begin novel-writing again”

(160). This assertion—that “the wives of upper-class clergymen do not scribble idle fiction”—may seem incredulous to modern ears, considering the fame Burney enjoyed

(160). In this instance, Burney’s situation serves as a perfect example of the equivocal status of the novel and women writers of this time. Even one of the most popular, successful, irreproachable women novelists could still be looked down upon by the upper ranks of society for appearing publicly as an Authoress.

The prefatory texts of Camilla raise two questions. First, the dedication “To the

Queen,” can be read as a complex blend of earnest gratitude and compulsion. After her hopes for marriage with Cambridge dissolved, and her father compelled her to accept

Queen Charlotte’s summons to serve as Keeper of the Robes. However, she found the

Queen “cared little for novels” (171). In fact, the Queen assumed that, “like other necessary, if vulgar, habits,” Burney would put away the trivial pastime of novel-writing now that she had risen in the world (Doody 171). Burney did not share these opinions and was not swayed—privately—even by the Queen. She took herself seriously as a writer and viewed her time at court, seen by those around her as the highest honor, as an imprisonment, and a waste of valuable writing time. Burney spent roughly five years

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(1786-1791) in the restrictive environment of court life, which, for all its so-called honor, amounted to servitude and isolation from family and friends. 22 In her journals, she described her time at court as torture. Nonetheless, at its conclusion, Queen Charlotte, a powerful woman and mother-figure of whom Burney always wrote with genuine love and compassion, sent her away with a pension that gave her independence from her father for the first time in her life. She was, in her own words, “restored to life and liberty,” able to marry a man of her own choosing against her father’s wishes and to begin writing another novel (qtd in Doody 196). Whatever desire for escape she felt while at court—desires that would be construed as treasonous ingratitude by everyone of her acquaintance—one imagines her misery dissipated once she was released. In the end, then, we might consider her dedication sincere. Whether she intended to or not, the Queen contributed to Burney’s career as an author for the remainder of her life.

The “Advertisement” raises further questions. Burney names three specific women, thanking them in expressive terms. Yet her real-life relationships with these women were unremarkable—Mrs. Boscawen and Mrs. Crewe were both friends of her father and patrons of her work. They shared in her general society, parties, and ‘close family circle,’ but they were not her intimate friends. Her journals do not record the kind of one-on-one conversation with either woman that would indicate a close personal relationship. Mrs. Locke comes closer to this description, as they spent some time together and shared some individual conversation. Closer review of this period in

22 Margaret Anne Doody’s chapter “The Windsor and Kew Tragedies” covers this portion of Burney’s life and does full justice to the complex combination of familial, emotional, and situational problems that contributed to Burney’s dry spell during this fourteen year interval. Among other things, Burney did begin the composition of two tragic plays, which I do not treat here. Margaret Anne Doody. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. (1988)

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Burney’s life, particularly before her court years, reveals rather the loss of the greatest female friendship in Burney’s life—that of Mrs. Thrale, who was both an intimate friend and mother figure. Therefore, the “Advertisement” may also be read in terms of this omission of Burney’s dearest friend, a fact that is well-documented in the journals and letters of both women. Burney’s community of female friends was never the same after

Mrs. Thrale (later Piozzi) left it.

Considering her long absence from print, we cannot forget that the first addressee in the “Advertisement” is her readers, to whom she wishes to “express […] some portion of the gratitude with which she is filled, by the highly favourable reception given to her TWO former attempts in this species of composition” (5). Additionally, she considers “the many Friends whose kind zeal has forwarded the present undertaking” part of her support system, which again emphasizes through its omission the one person who would have considered himself most worthy of such mention—her father

(5). One could argue that she might not mention him as a sign of wishing to honor his humility, but this would hardly be consistent with either her prefatory poem in Evelina or her dedication to him in The Wanderer. The effect of the prefatory materials as a whole is a focus on female relationships and, considering the omissions, the great losses she has suffered in them. Her strained relationships loom large over this text.

In the intervening years between Camilla and The Wanderer another strong group of women writers came to prominence that also influenced the value of female relationships in the novel. Charlotte Smith became a widely known poet and novelist,

Maria Edgeworth rose to prominence as a novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft expressed the sentiments of many women seeking equality in her essays, reviews and novels.

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Women authors remained aware of Burney’s early mark on their genre, but her works mingled with their own as the eighteenth century drew to a close and the nineteenth century began. Nevertheless, reviewers consistently referred back to Cecilia in a way that established her among the elite circle of women writers who set the high water mark for women’s novels. Before returning to Burney’s last published novel, I’d like to examine the varying ways Burney’s emerging sister novelists engaged in the same kind of multi-vocal, rhetorical use of their prefatory spaces, their relationships with their readers, and their intertextual dialogues with fellow women writers. Addressing these novelists not only shows Burney’s influence during her lifetime but allows us to see the trends to which The Wanderer eventually responds.

Private Sorrows and Charlotte Smith’s Communal Public Voice

An author such as Burney shared only bits of her personal life with her readers.

Her dedication to Camilla names and thanks a few female friends for their support of her writing, yet she does not allude to the nature of those relationships, nor does she mention anything so indelicate as her financial situation or any assistance they might have given her. As we have seen, this had a great deal to do with her social status. In contrast, Charlotte Smith, an author of comparable popularity, had less concern with rank because of her need for the financial relief her writing afforded her. Smith had a far more uphill battle for legitimacy than some of her fellow women writers. She did not have the cover of anonymity at the outset, nor did she begin as a member of the upper classes. Born into the gentry, a bad marriage left Smith financially destitute, rendering her poems and novels, like herself, vulnerable to the whims of public taste. Smith understood acutely the value of friendship and social connections, for they built her career and meant the difference between feeding or starving her children. As such,

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Smith’s relationship with her readers—viewed by some as detracting from her legitimacy as a poet and writer—is integral to our understanding of her writing.

Smith excelled in the art of creating a sympathetic authorial persona through which to communicate with her audience by sharing intimate details about her life circumstances and family. In doing so, she created a far more personal connection with her readers. Smith exudes an air of immediacy and authenticity in her prefatory materials, speaking directly to her readers in a beseeching tone of familiarity. She appeals to her readers’ humanity as she speaks of her personal sorrows. Since her readers can empathize and, in some cases, share her suffering, she also speaks to and for women collectively, with a sympathy that moves in both directions, much as Hume described in his Treatise on Human Nature (1759). As Hume characterizes it, “when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others, these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceived to belong to another person” (240).

Smith encouraged readers to extend these shared sympathies beyond the individual writer or reader alone and to the community of which they were all a part. In the prefatory poem in Emmeline (1788) dedicated “To My Children,” her attitude to her readers is made manifest through that expressed to her children. The speaker of the poem feels “O’erwhelmed with sorrow,” but relies upon “the still plaintive lyre [to] essay its powers,/ and dress the cave of Care with Fancy’s flowers” so that “you, dear objects of my care,/ Escape the evil I was born to bear” (44). By the time she published

Marchmont (1796), her comfort with her readers shows in the length and tone of her

Preface. She shares at length about her own troubles, admits their connection to the

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negative characterizations (of lawyers in particular) in her novel, and then explains that she does so for the good of the community—

yet some purpose will be answered if the representation should deter any individual, who has a drop of many or [sic] human blood in his heart, from sharpening the fangs of one of these scourges of the earth against the innocent and defenseless then perhaps some group of promising children, of unprotected orphans, may escape the misery, desolation, and death that have fallen on mine! (xiv)

Therefore, the cathartic influence of Smith’s shared life story amounts to a collectively positive experience. In speaking up for herself as a wronged woman, she speaks up for many women and children who have no voices, engaging the sympathies of the public on their behalf.

Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) enjoyed such popularity that she wrote a total of six prefaces for the eight printed editions. When the expansion of materials warranted a second volume, she also added a preface to it in 1797. An examination of these successive editions reveals a highly developed public persona: devoted mother, abandoned wife, reluctant artist, and longsuffering victim of an outdated legal system.

Readers can see the evolution of her political, social, and artistic voice as Smith moves from fledgling artist to successful poet.

In her early works Smith overemphasized her hesitancy to publish her works in an effort to conform with expectations of women writers. She explains the appearance of her poems through the efforts of “some of my friends [who] with partial indiscretion, have multiplied the copies they procured of several of these attempts, till they found their way into the prints of the day in a mutilated state” (iv). Her wording suggests that she did not initiate the publication process, since the copying and distribution happened without her express consent; thus she carefully displaces the responsibility of a public

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display of authorship onto her friends. Smith knew that it was far better for a woman to appear to have been pushed into publication by well-meaning friends than to seem mercenary. This rhetorical construct of the modest, private female catered to existing expectations of women and allowed her to maintain an air of respectability.

The “Preface” to the first and second editions of the Elegiac Sonnets shows

Smith’s understanding that women were considered interlopers in the world of poetry.

Smith hesitates to call her “little poems” sonnets, though she knows that they fit the criteria. However, this gesture toward proper feminine modesty partially conceals her confidence in her abilities as an author. Even here, echoes of Burney, and some of her male contemporaries, can be heard as she suggests subversively her own ideas about form. In one breath, she begs for the “protection” of her friend and fellow poet William

Heyley and then admits that she “cannot deny having [herself] some esteem for” the poems (b). Next, she humbly demurs, claiming that her poems “have no very just claims” to the proper form of the sonnet; yet she subtly gives herself some credit by adding that even Mr. Heyley has trouble fitting the English language with the form (b2).

Her abrupt shift to her personal experience in the writing of the poems may seem like a change of subject. However, this portion of the preface actually reflects Smith’s alternate formulation of the genre: “Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought” (iv). Smith’s description of the cause, experience, and effects of writing poetry in fact resonate with, and may have influenced, later Romantic poetics. In her own way, Smith designates and justifies a feminine poetics, a claim she would expand and defend more robustly as her career expanded.

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Like Burney—and later Edgeworth and Austen—Smith also used the rhetorical figure of the reader to her advantage, for to her readers she owed her continued success and livelihood. She credits her readers with giving her the courage to continue writing. In the first edition of the Elegiac Sonnets, Smith “hope[s] for readers … who to sensibility of heart, join sensibility of taste”—readers whose mental and emotional responses will mirror those of the friends who distributed her poems (i.v.). When she revised the preface for the third edition, she acknowledges that the “reception of the public” has been such that continued requests have been made for more of her poetry

(v). By the sixth edition, Smith reveals the sense of connection she has with her readers, whom she trusts to identify with the pathos of her poems. Smith seems to understand that her detractors will not outweigh the sympathetic reception she receives from those who continue to praise her work. Perhaps the publication of a sixth edition warrants her confidence that an “indulgent Public” will continue to prove even a “friend of whose judgment [she] has a high opinion” wrong when he suggested that some more

“cheerful” poems “might be better liked by the Public” (ix, x, xii). For Smith, who responded, “I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy,” if the public has cherished her misery and loved her this long, then she will continue to tell them the reasons for it.

In the preface to the sixth edition, Smith lays out her personal grievances in great detail—a choice that won her both sympathy and criticism. Taking advantage of the fame her writing has afforded her, Smith uses the direct address of author to reader available to her through the preface to begin to talk about controversial issues. She begins with a very straightforward attack on the gendered double standard of public and private discourse for women. As an established writer who recognized the public role

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and expectations of a woman who has been “frequently appearing as an Authoress,”

Smith notes with irony in the sixth edition of the Sonnets that “for a woman—‘the Post of

Honor is a Private Station’” (xii). She points out the obvious: the poetry so dearly loved by the public originated in private sorrows. Once she has established the position she has been placed in as a woman, she walks not delicately but precisely over the controversial ground where public crosses over to private, explaining that the troubles that inspired her poetry were “of a domestic and painful nature” (xi). Smith’s airings of personal grievances, and the public’s continuing support of her work, demonstrates that topics and themes that had been labeled “feminine”—and therefore private—were beginning to gain a foothold of legitimacy in the public sphere. Smith’s emotive connection with her readers establishes the fact that private “sensations,” feelings, and most controversially, ideas, were beginning to enter into the public arena by way of women’s books (i.v.).

Smith shifted to fiction with a trepidation that changed quickly to confidence. She included no preface to Emmeline (1788) and instead relied on the support of her current readers by writing a dedicatory poem to her children. In this way, she brilliantly used what was for her a “safe” genre while taking on the persona of a mother and aligning her novel with the existing subgenre of exemplary fiction, which allowed women to express opinions through the nonthreatening role of a teacher. 23 She expresses hopes for her children – and by extension her readers. However, following the enormous success of Emmeline and her next novel Ethelinde (1789), Smith decided to write a

23 The characters in exemplary fiction were portrayed as examples or models for young readers to follow, which allowed women writers of this genre to take on a non-threatening maternal role.

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novel that touched on some political themes—a novel that left her uneasy enough to write a much less confident preface than those of the poems.

Smith’s Preface to Desmond (1792) shows a keen awareness that she is trespassing on traditionally masculine territory. The first line is reminiscent of Burney’s

Evelina, or A Young Lady’s Entry into the World (1778), for Smith claims to be “sending into the world a work so unlike” her others that she “feel[s] in some degree of that apprehension which an Author is sensible of on a first publication” (45). She resorts to her usual reminder to her readers of her personal situation that creates the necessity for appearing before the public, but she also begins to address the more complex position of women writers. In this case, Smith builds a careful argument that highlights this disconnect between social convention and what she has begun to see as women’s rightful claims to a public voice. First, she explains that her primary impetus for writing was the care of her family—that she has been “compelled to write” to support her children in what she calls the “observance” of her domestic duties (46). Under such circumstances, she “became an Author by Profession” (46). She then presses the issue further by pointing out that the “adversity” she has experienced came at the hand of various men who seem to exercise power over her affairs “without impunity”; to these men she attributes her “involuntary appearance in the world” (46). However, in spite of her frequent protests, she follows every negative statement about being forced into authorship with a positive one that essentially negates the former. She celebrates the friends her role as a public figure has brought, including a “female friend” who “is the pride and pleasure of [her] life” (46). Thus her rhetorical posture as a properly silent woman wears particularly thin by the publication of Desmond.

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Smith gives two reasons for her “apprehensions” about her new book. The first is the expression of improper desires in one of the characters. However, she defends this character as an example of goodness since his regulation of these desires should be admired and emulated. Second, she cites her awareness of the problematic nature of the presence of “political remarks” in the story. (Recall Radcliffe’s similar concerns in her Journey made in the summer of 1794, though it was only a travel journal.) Smith’s awareness, however, does not inhibit her from making several forward-thinking statements about women’s rights to comment on politics. Smith claims to have located and shown in her work the best political arguments made by others, which appear to be so because they have “the predominant power of truth [that] can neither be altered nor concealed” (ii). Although she alleges that she merely represent the conversations of others, her simultaneous assertion that the best arguments represent “truth” reveals her own opinions, thereby undermining her claim of impartiality. She follows up with an impassioned argument for a woman’s right to have “business with politics” by reconnecting women with the rest of humanity through their domestic (or perhaps more accurately, familial) ties. She argues that women have “fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged … in the scenes that are acting around them” (iii). She moves from the present to the course of history and education, questioning how women can be taught history but be expected to have no opinion about it—most importantly holding this false conception of education to account for creating a situation in which women can be “censured as affecting masculine knowledge if they happen to have any understanding” (iv). Here we hear Smith echo Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in its challenge to enact real change in women’s education. Wollstonecraft

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“wish[es] to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution” (Rights of Woman). In this case, a masculine education merely means the kind of education that was available only to men. For Smith, the purpose of Desmond’s preface is to advocate for the removal of this gendered boundary. Her phrasing suggests that she has read and agrees with Wollstonecraft’s work, as her argument is perfectly aligned with it.24

In fact, Smith’s preface to Desmond provides an excellent example of the interconnectedness of many women’s writings at this time. Certainly not all women alluded to one another’s work, but occasionally the web-like strands of connected ideas can be seen in texts like this one. The most common themes seem to focus on education as it relates to appearances, duplicity, and the equality of men’s and women’s minds. In her comments about women and education, Smith notes that women might be

“censured as affecting masculine knowledge if they happen to have any understanding”

(iv). This statement resonates with several other texts in circulation before, during, and after its publication. One of Austen’s frequently quoted lines about women’s education comes from Northanger Abbey: “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can” (112). This sounds precisely like the ironic commentary on relations between men and women that it is; yet, taken out of context, it loses much of its relationship to the discussion of the day on education, novels, and what Smith refers to as “masculine knowledge.” In Austen’s scene,

24 Likewise, Burney, who published after Smith died, made similar statements about women’s rights to speak about politics as a result of their naturally occurring connections with the men in their lives.

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Catherine, Henry, and Eleanor are discussing the types of books men and women should read as well as the types of knowledge men and women should possess. The scene asks more questions than it answers, for Henry is charmed by Catherine’s ignorance and his ability to “teach” her. Austen’s discussion of this concept is doubly allusive. She brings in Burney’s equally biting send-up of a flighty but beautiful young girl in Camilla: “The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author … imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms” (112). Clair Grogan has also noted that this reference in Northanger Abbey resembles nearly word for word some advice Lady

Montague gave to her grand-daughter in her published letters (124).25 Each text by

Smith, Burney, and Austen reinforces the shared beliefs that women needed to have the same kind of education men were already receiving, that society restricted their accomplishment of this goal by creating false divisions in language, and that women themselves participated in these false constructs by pretending to be less knowledgeable than they were. These authors also knew that by referencing one another’s ideas, they would appear to be part of something larger than themselves.

Considering the ways that Smith’s Preface resonates through so many different texts, it could be said that it both builds and maintains an inter-textual community through public discourse. It works as a threshold between the outer world of ideas, other texts, and critical commentary. It transitions between the inner world of the novel—

25 Grogan includes this fascinating tidbit in her edition of Northanger Abbey. Lady Morgan wrote to her daughter regarding the education of her granddaughter: “The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness” (qt. in Grogan 124).

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where Smith will engage those ideas on her own ground – and the prefatory space, where she enacts her own version of simultaneous and ever changing inside and outside forces. Her popularity with the public seems to have given her the courage to refute current arguments about women and to enter into discussions about

Revolutionary ideas. Like Wollstonecraft—and perhaps not coincidentally Austen,

Edgeworth, and Burney—she does so by addressing the ongoing debate over genre and the novel,26 for she challenges directly those who would “exclaim against the impropriety of making a book of entertainment the vehicle of political discussion” (viii).

She does, however, leave her audience of novel readers the challenge of considering for themselves whether “the slight skirmishing of a novel writer” can have any impact

“against the powerful efforts of learning and genius—though united in that cause which must finally triumph—the cause of truth, reason, and humanity” (ix). Perhaps therein lies the rub—Smith does not claim novels as the ultimate, exclusive source for education, understanding, or self-fulfillment; rather, she suggests that they might be a vehicle alongside “the efforts of learning” to assist men and women toward “truth, reason, and humanity” – truth being absolute, reason being the ultimate mastery of the self, and humanity being a virtue that early feminists sought to be recognized as equal in men and women.

The preface to Marchmont (1796) reveals an author secure in her readership and fame, one who has perfected the art of writing her audience into a text. She uses the preface as an act of narrative performativity, one that ultimately has the potential to

26 To clarify, I do not suggest that Austen, Edgeworth, or Burney made direct claims to women’s rights to discuss politics in novels; rather, I compare these authors’ shared interest in the formulation of the novel as genre.

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empower women writers and readers by “provid[ing] insight into the process of [a specifically] female self-legitimization” (Nixon, qtd. in Rennhak).27 This model of self- legitimization is most visible in her later works, and reinforced in the lives of the characters in her novels. Although Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed many of Smith’s works, her most generous critical review was for Marchmont, and in it she discusses the preface much more than the novel itself.28 Even Wollstonecraft was taken in by Smith’s rhetorical ‘self,’combined with her increasingly bold assertions about the Revolution in

France in Desmond. In turn, Smith’s various allusions to the writings of women like

Wollstonecraft serve to highlight and reinforce the solidarity that the characters in her novels have shown as early as Emmeline. As Smith found real women friends, women who supported and financed her writing, as well as a sympathetic public that continued to purchase her works, she became bolder in her agreement with her sister authors. As

Austen intimated, she has taken a stand for the novel and her own participation in its production rather than shied away from owning it. She has held her ground rather than deserting the sisterhood of novelists in spite of the fact that she, more than many women authors, was one of Austen’s “injured” authorial “bodies.”

Community in Crisis

In Austen’s imagining, women writers and readers choose their own language and reading materials and, in doing so, attain the power to form a collective “we” that can then extend beyond the border of a single novel and into the life and fiction of other women. This collective “we” both elevates and shelters women writers and their readers

27 Rennhak singles Smith out for her “construction of the authoress as a heroically suffering mother figure,” although Smith’s use of the preface is far more complex than that (61).

28 I will discuss Wollstonecraft’s reviews of Smith’s works at length in the following chapter.

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and, in their own time, the growing respectability of women’s novels lifted them as a

“body” in the eyes of the world.

Each of the women in this study worked toward the construction of a genre that supported the collective improvement of the situation of all women. In many cases, authors of the period stated their expectations for a variety of “types” of readers, but women in particular carved out a specific set of issues, keywords, references, and even nuances of language through which to create unique relationships with their women readers. The formation of this genre developed with and through its readers as they interacted with women writers. Women who produced novels also consumed them. The community of women writers and readers cannot be separated because they are bound by their shared position in a society dominated by patriarchal systems.

Yet this symbiosis remained embedded within the larger context of social antagonism. We must remember that in her ‘Defense’ Austen was commenting on – or rather updating her comments upon, a trend she recognized her sister novelists had been discussing since she penned her first draft of Northanger Abbey in 1798 and 1799.

Her ‘Defense’ echoes Burney’s earlier dismay at being “disdained by [her] humble brethren of the quill” (Evelina 7). The difference is that in 1778 Burney creates gender confusion by attaching masculine pronouns when speaking in general terms of Authors and Novelists, while Austen makes her claim for women as a body of novelists more overt by her revision of 1812. It seems that between 1778 and 1812 the terrain has become a bit more hostile.

The hostility to which Austen seems to allude after the turn of the century may well be explained by the general resistance to an increasingly vocal women’s

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movement, and a more specific response to one woman whose reputation was sacrificed to this cause. In 1798, William Godwin published the posthumous Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which revealed details of

Wollstonecraft’s life that so soundly discredited her in the public eye that any woman writer who wished to forward the cause of women in any overt manner ran the risk of being associated with sexual misconduct or an unnatural, unfeminine desire for power.

As a result, in the years following the Wollstonecraft scandal, any woman who desired change for women—who wished to defend or forward the “rights of women”—had to do so with great caution. The scenery had altered and the critical voices spoke more harshly than ever, requiring women authors to reframe their arguments. The desire for friendship and community among women can be seen in their writings, but some women altered both their expectations and their goals within the genre as the landscape changed.

Austen’s call for solidarity –“Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” – recognizes the possibility of women’s relationships, but it also acknowledges the reality that these relationships were always under attack (Northanger Abbey 30). If women writers spent the decades before the turn of the century formulating community through relationships, they spent the years following it redoubling their efforts with increasing complexity of language. As before, their relationships can best be seen through Johnson’s definition— as against a common enemy (1:836). Yet, more than ever, women relied upon paratextual discourses and intra-textual dialogues to shape meaning, the novel, and the communities in which they traveled.

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CHAPTER 5 (RE)CREATING THE NOVEL: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S REVIEWS, MARIA EDGEWORTH’S LOOSE ENDS, AND FRANCES BURNEY’S LEGACY

The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them: not indiscriminately, for then it would have little effect; but, if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments.

—Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Frances Burney noted in her anonymous “Preface” to Evelina in 1778, that

“[i]n the republic of letters, there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble Novelist … among the whole class of writers, perhaps not one can be named of which the votaries are more numerous but less respectable” (7).

In her attempt to lend some respectability to the novel via affiliation, Burney names

“Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett” to give a kind of literary lineage for her own work. Austen follows Burney’s lead in her extended ‘Defense of the Novel,’ but chooses to name only women as her literary forbearers.29 In doing so, she invokes the same status, but also acknowledges her awareness that a distinct set of standards were being carved out by women writers for their novels. While her

‘Defense’ takes a stand for the legitimacy of this tradition, the text in which it is embedded moves far beyond a simple recognition of a trend—it also engages in a critical dialogue about the novel. After all, the majority of Northanger Abbey represents

29 By this time, Austen’s authorship, and therefore her gender, was known. In contrast, when Burney wrote Evelina her gender was unknown.

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Austen’s early entry into an ongoing discussion about genre and gender that women had already begun. Before Austen penned her ‘Defense,’ Maria Edgeworth had defended the abilities of women writers in her Letters for Literary Ladies (1795)30 telling her readers that women “have written with elegance, eloquence, precision, and ingenuity” (83). Austen’s later novels explore dimensions of these topics she had only initiated in Northanger Abbey. She had yet to try her hand at enacting – rather than simply staging a brilliant discussion of – the theories of the novel that Burney, Smith,

Wollstonecraft, and Edgeworth had been working at for years.

In this chapter, I look at this collective enterprise of women’s novels, their shared goals, and the ways they worked toward these goals by shaping a distinctly female genre. I consider this collective enterprise a form of meta-friendship—among authors, among readers, and between author and reader. This meta-friendship was constructed from the interconnected relationships that created women’s collective community.

In their novels, women’s friendships can first be examined through the relationships of the primary female character. In her own way, each author centered her novels on a female character that represented both a proto-type and an anti-type.

Before a new model could be articulated, women novelists had the task of defining their

Heroine against the types that patriarchal social standards set forth in print, which meant addressing representations of women in conduct books, histories, and philosophical arguments. Reformulating a genre also meant repurposing the exemplary form by reclaiming the female figure. As we have seen in their prefaces, this anti-type is

30 The extensively revised second edition was published in 1799. See further details of these dates of publication below.

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sometimes named, as in Wollstonecraft’s “Advertisement” to Mary, whose Heroine is

“neither a Clarissa, a Lady G——, nor a Sophie,” 31 or as in Burney’s “Preface” to

Evelina, alluded to by way of a list of male novelists whose works feature this anti-type as a prominent character (Mary par. 1). In Burney’s case, the allusion is complicated, but her intent to relate the list of male authors to her own work is clear, for she brings them out under the guise of praise, yet she uses that praise to explain how her novel will be both different and better (Evelina 9). In other cases, the female anti-type is merely explained against a general trend while being carefully aligned with certain venerated women novelists. Maria Edgeworth says in her “Advertisement” to Belinda that she will “adopt the name of novel” only as it applies to those women she chooses as her forbearers—including Frances Burney—before denouncing the generality of novels because “so much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books under this classification” (3). In every case, these writers defined the new Heroine in part against a tradition of patriarchal representation, regardless of whether it came in novels written by men or women. They worked hardest to eradicate the firmly entrenched masculine tradition of false perfection, one that disguised women’s frailty and obedience as virtue.

Through their alternative Heroine, they insisted upon women’s capacity for independent reason, for learning, and for governing themselves. The new Heroine was to be “a young female … with a virtuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart” (Evelina 7). Possessed of these qualities, such a Heroine allowed them to make various arguments for the equal education of women. In terms of stylistic revisions, they

31 Wollstonecraft misspelled the name of Rousseau’s character Sophia in the “Preface” to Mary (1788). In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), she spelled it correctly.

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preferred realism in both events and characters. The novel, rather than focusing in “the fantastic regions of Romance … where Reason is an outcast” should “avoid what is common, without adopting what is unnatural” (Evelina 8). As Austen intimates in her

‘Defense,’ these qualities are the best means to achieve deep insight into human nature, and to construct a respectable vehicle for women authors’ wit, intelligence, and skillful mastery of language.

A key component to consider in this tradition lies in the social realities that influenced the way women writers were viewed in the public sphere. The development of alternate versions of the novel and the new Heroine did not happen in a vacuum.

Writers whose lives and careers traversed the changes of the tumultuous 1790s and the opening of the new century witnessed several dizzying turns in what was acceptable and proper for women to do and say. In the previous chapter, I discussed those authors who made use of paratexts and intertextual allusions to create community with their readers in a way that imitated and reinforced the female friendships in their novels. I focused, however, on those novels written in the social climate that existed prior to the

1790’s and what I have described as the ‘Wollstonecraft scandal.’ In this chapter I move into the 1790s and beyond, beginning with Wollstonecraft.

Although Mary Wollstonecraft is not the only writer relevant to the changes at the turn of the century, her life and death are, in many ways, central to those changes.

Wollstonecraft maintains a paradoxical and dual relevance to women’s literature in the long eighteenth century. Her essays, reviews, and novels made her a visible representative of emerging feminist ideas, yet her posthumous reputation caused irreparable damage to that cause. In order to address the complex intertextual

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relationships Wollstonecraft shared with the writers in this study, I take a two-pronged approach to this chapter. I first discuss the ways she represented and influenced her times; I then examine novels written after her death in order to understand how the scandal of her Memoirs exacerbated growing concerns about the women’s movement and influenced the methods women writers used to continue their shared goals. Finally, since Burney published both before and after Edgeworth and Wollstonecraft, I examine the “Preface” to her last novel, The Wanderer, which serves as a reflection of the progress women writers achieved over the course of her life.

Wollstonecraft’s Reviews

Wollstonecraft was more than a political essayist. Her formulations for the novel, its Heroine, and its function as an educational device can be seen in her critical reviews, which then informed her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and finally found full expression in the prefaces to her novels.

Mary Wollstonecraft found her first opportunity for a widely-read, public, and authoritative voice as a critical reviewer for the Analytical Review, beginning in 1788 and ending just before her death in 1797.32 Aside from its role in bringing her a degree of financial independence, this form of writing gave her a platform from which to sway public opinion in favor of women’s novels, as well as a way to express her ideas about women’s education and reason. Mitzi Myers has argued that Wollstonecraft’s time at the

Analytical Review allowed her to become an “authoritative public figure who altered the social, political, and literary sphere during the transitional period of the 1790s”

32 Wollstonecraft’s last dated review was of Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the eighteenth Century in 1796. I discuss the significance of this review in further detail below.

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(“Wollstonecraft’s Reviews” 82). Though she responded to works in a variety of genres, she reviewed more novels by women than she did by men.33 Her critical reviews allowed her to expand her role as a participant in the community of women readers and writers.

Wollstonecraft took advantage of her role as a critic to invent herself as an aggregate of genre theorist, instructor, and literary style-maker. Her ability to take on this role was a result of the particular qualities of the critical reviews of the long eighteenth century. Like the preface, the ability of the critical review to modify the structure of the novel and its accompanying vision of women and women writers can be found in its unique, privately inhabited, yet publicly experienced space. Like any other form of reading, reviews exist simultaneously as private experiences in the mind and as joint public experiences as a result of broad distribution and readership. If the preface is mediated by the author (as discussed in the previous chapter), the review can be considered doubly mediated, particularly when the reviewer reproduces versions of the text through lengthy summary for his or her audience. In essence, the reviewer is a surrogate reader for a secondary group of readers—a kind of hybrid reader/writer.

Such grey areas are prime territory for women writers to blur the lines between public and private. According to Mary Waters, in the public space of a review, “private

33 I base this statement on a survey of the “Index of Books Reviewed” at the end of Wollstonecraft’s complete published reviews (487-502). I included in my survey any work titled “A Novel,” “A Tale,” “A Romance,” or “A Story,” as well as any other work that Wollstonecraft responded to in her review by giving one of these denominations. My results were as follows: Wollstonecraft reviewed fifty-one (51) novels by women; forty (40) novels by men; and eleven (11) novels wherein the gender of the author is indeterminate. Several of the novels I include in the gender-indeterminate category are translations of foreign works, or collections of letters, which both complicates issues of gender. In these cases, the gender of the original author may be different than that of the translator; or the existence of a so-called “translator” may simply be a ruse to hide the gender identity of a male or female author, which complicates further issues of gender and genre since this made “translator” another means for authors of either sex to publish anonymously.

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values and many activities regarded as private under most definitions of the public sphere turn out to have broad public implications,” since they introduce the private space of the novel to the public (14). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reviews became permeable textual spaces where writing and reading women could be simultaneously public and private. Periodicals like the Analytical Review, The Quarterly

Review, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine allowed the reader “vicarious participation in a now primarily textual public sphere [that] would extend not only to middle class men, but to women as well” (Waters 92). As a result, the reviewer could bring the issues that concerned women out of the private, domestic space—quite literally through the novel—and into the public.

Reviews spoke back to novels and to the public; therefore they also became a place for conversation between reading and writing women. The dialogue of reviewer and novelist in the popular presses represents the broader interplay of ideas. As we have seen, both Burney and Edgeworth make public addresses to the critical press in their prefaces. Personal relationships between authors and reviewers varied.34

However, the portion of the dialogue represented within the review remains relevant because it graced the public stage and presented arguments that helped define and

34 Some authors were unknown to their reviewers, others took advantage of special relationships with the publishers of the periodicals and those attached to them to publicize their books via book reviews, and still others found their books under review as a result of rivalries with certain literary journals for political reasons. A publisher of a journal who also paid to publish an author’s book might, on a rare occasion, cut costs by allowing that author to write his or her own anonymous review. I believe, however, that in spite of these many potential biases, my focus on the influence of the review as it was read and understood by the public can still be theorized separately from writers and publishers. I am more interested in the influence of the review on popular reading and women’s social standing. Although the politics that went into the production of reviews certainly influenced women’s social realities, I attempt here to focus on the post-publication aspects of reviews—as texts and cultural objects.

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redefine the boundaries of the novel. The shifting of these boundaries could only occur by including the public, even if that inclusion was only illusory.

Considering the unique position Wollstonecraft held as a public commentator on women’s novels, her negative remarks on them call her motives into question. Although

Wollstonecraft offered more biting criticism than she did praise, I believe her motive in treating her fellow women writers so harshly was a genuine belief in the power of the novel to enact social change for all women. Wollstonecraft’s negative comments about bad novels may seem to contradict this theory. However, she addressed this very idea in one of her reviews by observing that “the inconsiderate are apt to conclude, that a novel is one of the lowest order of literary productions; though a very different estimation seems to be suggested by the small number of good ones which appear”

(472). In this small number, therefore, we must look for the beliefs and hopes she held for the novel.

Mitzi Myers believes that Wollstonecraft tended to be “harder on women … [and] harder on cultural conditioning agents masquerading as fiction, precisely because she hoped to improve her sex and held the novel in high regard” (“Wollstonecraft’s Reviews”

88). In her “Introduction” to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft speaks to subgroups within her own sex with a mix of sarcasm and solidarity when she lays out the standard for women—“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone (12). The women who agree with her will not only appreciate being addressed as “rational creatures,” but be amused by her criticisms of silly women who need to be flattered.

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Wollstonecraft weaves the same acerbic wit, intelligence, and ideas from Rights of

Woman throughout her critical work in order to distinguish the rational from the irrational. Often she appears to hope with wry humor to shame the flighty and frivolous into being better readers—or writers.35

Wollstonecraft focuses her reviews on the effects of novels on her readers. The popularity of novels certainly was not limited to a female audience, but she appears far less interested in the effects of reading on the male population.36 Her concern is for women, to whom she feels a responsibility. In her review of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A

Simple Story, Wollstonecraft admires “the plan” of the novel, the “rising action” and “the constellation of splendid characters” that populate its pages (370-371). However, she includes Inchbald with many other women novelists when she laments one of the novel’s flaws: “Why do all female writers, even when they display their abilities, always give a sanction to the libertine reveries of men? Why do they poison the minds of their own sex, by strengthening the male prejudice that makes women systematically weak?”

(370). Though expressed in the negative, I consider Wollstonecraft’s disappointment representative of her belief that women’s novels could empower readers. She seems to plead for a writer as talented as Inchbald to adjust her representations of women, along with the dynamics of power in her story, in order to weaken—rather than strengthen—

35 Mitzi Myers characterizes her as “maternal … toward her imagined girl readers” and says that she “considers … her own voice … an educative example,” yet she admits that Wollstonecraft frequently displays an “irritation [that is] focuse[d] on women writers and readers” (“Wollstonecraft’s Reviews” 84).

36 Wollstonecraft “takes for granted a growing and predominantly female readership hungry for narrative, describing the audience of the very popular Charlotte Smith as ‘her fair countrywomen’” (Myers, “Wollstonecraft’s Reviews” 84-5). Myers refers here to Wollstonecraft’s review of Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake in the Analytical Review in 1789.

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“the male prejudice that makes women systematically weak” (370). A reversal of this system could strengthen women—in their own minds and in the minds of society.

These pointed criticisms suggests that her secondary audience is women writers, since she speaks to them in her reviews about the taste, style, content, and morality of their novels. In essence, she writes for the same constellation of readers as the other authors in this study. By engaging in this intertextual dialogue, she evokes the reading community of women and lends it political force.

Wollstonecraft empowers women’s collective literary works by focusing the commentary in her reviews on realistic characters and situations. She draws a connection between literary conventions and their ability either to grant agency or weaken young, impressionable readers in their attempts to navigate an antagonistic, misogynistic society. Mary A. Waters sees in Wollstonecraft’s reviews “an increasing willingness to engage [her] audience’s thinking in terms of intellectual respect rather than condescending didacticism,” though Wollstonecraft’s respect is more implied than stated (103). Wollstonecraft comments on various texts with a dry sarcasm that reads like an inside joke with her readers. By treating them as “rational creatures,” she leads by example for fellow women authors.

The Compliment of Quotation—Wollstonecraft Takes on Charlotte Smith

Wollstonecraft’s reviews of the popular poet and novelist Charlotte Smith over a series of years paint a fairly accurate picture of the way she uses the review to speak to women collectively, as well as providing a window into the formulation of her ideas about the novel. Wollstonecraft’s reviews of Smith also give a unique glimpse into the intertextual dynamic of two writers who had similar goals for women but who went about achieving them in very different ways. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, Smith’s

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courage as “an Authoress” standing for women’s right to speak on political matters parallels Wollstonecraft’s arguments in her Rights of Woman. It is surprising, then, to find that Wollstonecraft was remarkably critical of some of Smith’s fiction. To understand their differences, we must consider the changes in both women’s writing over their respective careers and the interplay of the ideas in question.

Wollstonecraft’s first public encounter with Smith’s work was her review of

Emmeline (1788), written only three months into Wollstonecraft’s role as a staff reviewer for the Analytical Review. Her various comments on Emmeline reveal her desire to shape women’s fiction in a way that encourages women to embrace reason and take charge of their own education. Though she both read and admired Smith’s poetry, her comments on Emmeline are less than glowing. Nonetheless, Wollstonecraft’s review of

Emmeline proves the exception rather than the rule of her reviews of novels, for however critical she is of Smith, she grants the text lengthy coverage in the form of analysis and sparing quotation. Many others fare far worse, receiving a mere scathing paragraph or two. A quick sampling:

OF Julia de Gramont: It is almost sufficient to say of this insipid production, that its preposterous incidents, and absurd sentiments, can only be equaled by the affected and unintelligible phrases the author has laboriously culled. (27)37 OF The Cottage of Friendship: a legendary Pastoral: The romantic unnatural fabrication of a very young lady, we suppose, from the little knowledge of life which appears, and as her playmates will find neither instruction nor amusement in this ridiculous pastoral, as it is called, we advise her to throw aside her pen and pursue a more useful employment (174). OF The Ill Effects of a Rash Vow: The style of this novel is tolerable; and some characters and incidents rather interesting: but the catastrophe,

37 Before we condemn Wollstonecraft for being too harsh, we should look at one of the quotes she chose to exemplify her criticism of this particular work, which reads: “He spoke—he sighed—he died!” (28). Wollstonecraft was not alone in her ridicule of such histrionics.

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which turns on the rather absurd vow, is so ridiculously dreadful, that we smiled at the numbers death swept away…” (83).38

Even such brief dismissals shed light on Wollstonecraft’s requirements for good novels in terms of character and incident. At minimum, she requires depictions of “sentiments” and “incidents” from “life,” a term that becomes shorthand for her preferred style of realism, to which she refers as either “natural” or “unnatural” in various subsequent reviews (Reviews). Placed in the context of her other critiques, then, Wollstonecraft’s examination of Emmeline is thorough and, though fairly critical, implies a degree of respect given to very few novels.39 Part of this respect is reflected in her notice that

Smith’s novel bears a resemblance to Burney’s Cecilia, which Wollstonecraft considers an exemplary novel (26).40

Wollstonecraft’s primary criticism of Emmeline centers on the degree of uncontrolled emotion displayed by the novel’s female characters, along with a few of the men. Wollstonecraft’s sarcastic description of Emmeline’s response to Delemere’s profession of love—“Emmeline weeps and trembles as an heroine ought to do on such an occasion”—sounds like Austen’s opening send-up of the romantic Gothic Heroine in

38 Unless otherwise noted, all cited materials from Wollstonecraft’s work for the Analytical Review refer to those printed in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 7. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, New York University Press, 1989. Volume seven of this series is titled independently, On Poetry and Contributions to the Analytical Review 1788-1797.

39 By modern standards, we would consider the format of this review mostly summary with a bit of commentary tossed in at the end – the kind of writing that would require a “Spoiler Alert” label in any of today’s media outlets. Within this format, Wollstonecraft’s opinions about content and characters become apparent as she works her way through a retelling of the story.

40 She also identifies the positive example of Emmeline’s education through reading. Nonetheless, Wollstonecraft does minimize its influence on her character by only mentioning briefly her accidental discovery of “some of our best authors in an old library,” the study of which “cultivated her understanding, and formed her taste” (22).

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Northanger Abbey in its mockery of stock Heroines with false sensibilities (22).41 The deeply sarcastic commentary sprinkled throughout the summary of the novel tends to underscore Wollstonecraft’s perception of Emmeline’s failure to escape the many traps set for her by the patriarchal forces around her. She emphasizes repeatedly the weaknesses of the male characters at each of the critical turns in the plot, and follows each description of male incompetence with Emmeline’s emotional responses—“he was affected by a temporary frenzy” and then she “sat with her handkerchief to her eyes … and sobbed aloud”; he “threw himself at her feet … and left her very unfit to return to the company after, excessively weeping” and then “a shower of tears fell from her eyes”; he fights “a ridiculous duel” and it “call[s] forth tears from her eyes,” as well as sending his mother into “convulsions” (emphasis mine 25). These accumulated theatrics call forth

Wollstonecraft’s criticisms of excessive “unnatural” emotion. She implies that if

Emmeline had acted differently, she might have escaped the manipulations that kept her so long at Delemere’s mercy.

Although she likes Smith as a writer, this review provides an early example of

Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with female characters and the role they play in “the forming of the mind[s]” of young female readers (26). “We have not observed,” she says, “many touches of nature in the delineation of the passions,” while further “lamenting … the preposterous sentiments our young females imbibe with such avidity” (26). She considers instead the effect of the characters, and the depictions of their emotions on readers. She even bases her assessment of plot on its influence over the reader: “the

41 Austen begins Northanger Abbey with the following description of the protagonist: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (5). The entire first chapter outlines all the ways that Catherine does not fit this role.

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false expectations that these wild scenes excite, tend to debauch the mind, and throw an insipid uniformity over the moderate and rational prospects of life” (26). Instead, her plan for a novel demands that young women find a reflection of reality in novels, at least enough so that they will not be left dissatisfied with their own lives after reading them.

Wollstonecraft’s particular demands for realism seem at moments to be less about actual stylistic preference than about feminist political motivation. Her mixed praise of Emmeline reveals her awareness of this slightly problematic relationship between unruly passions and what she calls “preposterous” or “unnatural” sentiments.

Wollstonecraft recognizes Smith’s “poetical talent” for language, which she formerly admired in her poetry, and now sees manifested in her prose. Smith’s poetic language expresses passion and pathos. In this case, she cannot criticize Smith’s style as unnatural, yet she remains motivated to shield her young female readers from what she considers dangerous indulgences of emotion. In her review, she claims that she has

“not observed many touches of nature in the delineation of the passions,” admitting only one exception—that of “the emotions which the descriptions of romantic views gave rise to; in them the poetical talents of the author appear, as well as in some sonnets interspersed through the work” (27). Wollstonecraft’s acute awareness of emotion led her to examine its manifestations in the relatively brief—though no less important— descriptions of scenes in nature. We have no way of knowing to which scenes

Wollstonecraft referred, but a review of Smith’s descriptions of natural beauty do have a few common denominators. Smith’s descriptions of nature itself are lovely and affecting—both to the characters in the novel and to the reader through the characters.

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The natural beauty inspires emotion and can also trigger memory, both of which reinforce relationships between the characters present in the scenes.

To “solve” this problem in her critique of Emmeline, Wollstonecraft says that she has decided to omit several direct quotations from the text that she admits she wanted to include.42 Her first reason is implied—the dangerous emotions that can be aroused through fiction are present in an otherwise beautiful scene. This choice raises questions about Wollstonecraft’s conceptions of realism and emotion. Is Nature itself an exception to her rule against the use of heightened language? Why must human nature—including its tendencies toward emotion—be separate from Nature? Perhaps without realizing it,

Wollstonecraft hits upon the problem of wanting to create fiction that is both exemplary and “natural.” While she is often justified in her criticisms of crimes against realism in other works, she cannot deny that some expressions of natural passions produce beautiful writing, however unlikely they are to lead a reader to exemplary behavior.

Smith’s use of Nature in combination with human emotion compounds this problem for

Wollstonecraft, since she appreciates the poetic aspects of such descriptions, but finds the accompanying excesses of human emotion at odds with her fictional ideals.

For example, in a scene that fits the description of those Wollstonecraft decided to omit, Emmeline and Lady Adelina are “contemplating the scenery which surrounded them,” which included “some beautiful cliffs,” some “very lovely country,” and “an extensive sea view” (430). Smith’s description of the scene aligns with Wollstonecraft’s

42 She again contradicts herself by including numerous citations from the text to exemplify some of the excessive emotions that bothered her. For example, she includes an excerpt from a scene in which “Delemere threw himself at her [Emmeline’s] feet, embraced her knees, and wept also…” etc. (qtd. in Wollstonecraft 24). Presumably, this is just the sort of language and unnatural expression of passions that she would wish her readers to avoid.

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ideas of poetic language, but neither scene nor language can be separated from the women present. Lady Adelina experiences a complex series of emotional responses in this scene: the scene calls forth emotions of the past, which in turn remind her of a poem she composed at that time and in this place; she then experiences deeper emotion by reading the poem and sharing her past experience with Emmeline. As she explains to Emmeline before reading it,

'You cannot imagine, my Emmeline …how exquisitely beautiful the prospect is from the point of these rocks where we stand, in the midst of summer; now the sun, more distant, gives it a less glowing and rich lustre, and reflects not his warm rays on the sea, and on the white cliffs that hang over it’ (430).

Initially, therefore, the scene contains only beautiful and poetic descriptions of their surroundings. However, the emotion connected with the scene comes from Adelina’s admitted habit of bringing past emotion into the present and “indulging that melancholy” she had “too much reason” to feel. These feelings are deepened by her recitation of the poem (430). The poem, which Smith includes in full as part of the text, is one of the sonnets Wollstonecraft admired openly in the review. It focuses exclusively on imagery and makes no mention of people or events. However, it is after Lady Adelina shares the poem with Emmeline that the fullness of the scene is realized:

The 'season and the scene' were brought by this description full on the mind of Emmeline; yet she almost immediately repented having pressed Adelina to repeat to her what seemed to have led her again into her usual tract of sad reflection. … The rest of the evening, however, passed in a sort of mournful tranquillity—Adelina seemed to feel encreasing pleasure as she gazed on her friend; and remembering all her goodness. (431)

In Smith’s rendering, Emmeline’s presence makes it possible for Lady Adelina to regain her composure and turn her tendency toward “sad reflection” and “reveries” that in turn lead her from “mournful[ness]” into a more “pleasurable” state. Put simply, being with a

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friend allows her to transform her sorrow into a more manageable and sedate emotional state.

Instead, Wollstonecraft seems to distrust any kind of emotion, even when it is shared in a setting that Smith sets up as a safe female space. Her stated reason for refusing to quote directly from Emmeline gives further insight. She claims that she would like to “give a specimen” of the text so that her readers can appreciate the author’s talent, but she believes that the poetic passages cannot “be separated from the woven web without injuring them” (27). Here she again reveals her ambivalence, for her comment does not apply only to the sonnets but to the prose segments which, as the examples show, incorporate emotions that are inspired by nature and shared between women. Wollstonecraft’s description of this effect as a woven web rings true because it emphasizes an appreciation for Smith’s craft. Smith has created an intricate, beautifully designed text that blends fiction and poetry. Yet, by calling emotion in one place beautiful and in another dangerous, Wollstonecraft renders her critique equivocal. Does she believe Smith’s novels are unnatural or merely dangerous when read by young women? In reviews like this one, Wollstonecraft demonstrates an unease with sensibility that she finds difficult to reconcile with her desire to make exemplary fiction conform to a moral code that will help young women learn to control themselves and, in doing so, achieve a degree of control in their lives.

Wollstonecraft’s preoccupation with the role of exemplary characters can also be seen in her analysis of the female friendships in the novel. She balances criticism with praise in her comparison of the two women friends Emmeline finds through her journeys—that of Mrs. Stafford and Lady Adelina. Adelina has broken the rules of

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society and left behind an awful husband, while daring to love another man. She does not act on this love, but she does marry the man when her husband dies. Wollstonecraft disapproves of Lady Adelina on the grounds that she is a poor example to Smith’s readers, who should not expect such things to happen in their own lives. Instead,

Wollstonecraft prefers the “rational resignation” displayed by Mrs. Stafford who “when disappointed in her husband, turned to her children” (27).43

Wollstonecraft shows a similar focus on the negative effects of Smith’s characters in her brief review of Ethelinde (1789) where she chastises Smith for her seeming lack of understanding of her novel’s impact on young female readers. She considers Smith’s fame a cause for added responsibility and thinks that if she knew

“how many females might probably read her pleasing production, whose minds are in a ductile state; [she] would not have cherished their delicacy, or more properly, their weakness, by making her heroine so very beautiful, and so attentive to preserve her personal charms” (189). This criticism shows an awareness of a specific reading community, to whom she holds Smith—and by extension all women writers— accountable. Wollstonecraft favors fiction that focuses on the benefits of reason to women, and that encourages them to focus their attention on the regulation of any tendency toward weakness, be it “delicacy” or emotional vulnerability.

43 She later expands this argument in her Rights of Woman, where she gives an extended example of the ways women can be disappointed in marriage and yet maintain a degree of power over their own lives through rational control of their emotions. She goes so far as to say that “an unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother” for essentially the same reasons as she does in her criticism of Emmeline (34).

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At the same time, her focus on discouraging this kind of display prevents her from seeing the value of the female friendships in Emmeline. She does not notice that when the women “fall” or weep, even in the examples she gives, they look to one another for support, rather than to the men. For example, in a situation similar to the one Wollstonecraft cited in her review, when Emmeline is trapped and forced to hear

Delemere’s professions of love, “as soon as she saw Mrs. Stafford, she threw herself into her arms, and sobbed aloud” (23). To her credit, Wollstonecraft does recognize the value of this female friendship. Earlier in the review, she identifies Mrs. Stafford as a

“character [on whom] we [are] meant to dwell when we have cursorily run over the main incidents,” even noting later how much her behavior and choices should be noted as models (22-23, 27).44 She admires this relationship, acknowledging the importance of daily intercourse and mentorship—Mrs. Stafford is “a most desirable companion for

Emmeline” because she “improved her understanding” and has “a taste for the fine arts”

(23). However, Wollstonecraft focuses much more negative attention on the overt expressions of emotion while failing to see Emmeline’s choice to repeatedly, and rather successfully, avoid the traditional stereotype of dependency on a male hero for emotional support. In this respect, her reading lacks subtlety, for in truth, Emmeline does control her emotions by choosing when and how to express them. Further,

Wollstonecraft does not recognize that Smith is doing what she attempts to do in her

44 She acknowledges that Emmeline’s early relationship with her mother-like governess had engendered “a warm heart,” and that her eventual friendship with Mrs. Stafford “improved her understanding and … her taste for the fine arts,” but she does not recognize the strength of the friendships, nor the foregrounding of the women in the story (22, 23).

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own novels, particularly in Maria, to give a vivid portrayal of the consequences of men’s attempts to enforce their own unruly passions and wills onto vulnerable women.

Wollstonecraft wrote her next review of Smith at the same time that she was formulating her Rights of Woman, which may explain in part the alterations of focus that made for a more positive response. Desmond was not only more overtly political and sympathetic to the cause of the French revolution; it was also more openly feminist.

With Desmond (1792), Smith seems to have earned Wollstonecraft’s respect, for she praises the novel as being superior to all her previous attempts and, rather than summarizing the plot in her review, she allows Smith’s text to “speak for itself” in its defense of their shared support for “the cause of freedom” in France (451).

Wollstonecraft’s only criticism relates to characterization; in this instance she does not condemn the character’s moral influence, a quality that stands first in her estimation. Wollstonecraft says that Smith’s characters “are sketched with that particular dexterity which shoots folly as it flies” (450). Instead, the novel as a whole exhibits

“more knowledge of the world than of the human heart,” which indicates that though her moral instinct is correct, her characterization lacks realism. (451). In fact, she says the novel is “written with her usual flow of language and happy discrimination of manners,” and chooses to leave the large part of the review for quotation of Smith’s text. In terms of Wollstonecraft’s standard “formula” for fiction, she seems to have allowed her political approval of Desmond to overtake her usual demands for exemplary heroines, since by her previous accounts “knowledge of the human heart” should be requisite for the kind of character and scenes that can produce moral instruction.

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Wollstonecraft also approves of Smith’s engagement with the formation of the genre of women’s fiction, specifically as it involves social reformation. Even

Wollstonecraft’s approval of Smith’s revolutionary sentiments is overshadowed by her approbation of her openly feminist assertions in the “Preface.” Mirroring the language of

Rights of Woman, she says that Smith “argues against the prejudice that women should avoid masculine knowledge and involvement in politics,” after which she quotes at length from Smith’s “Preface” (451). Wollstonecraft chooses to highlight Smith’s comments on the role of the novel in the discussion of politics, along with women’s rights to engage in such discussions. She cites the portion of the “Preface” in which

Smith anticipates those who will “exclaim against the impropriety of making a book of entertainment the vehicle of political discussion” and who dismiss “the slight skirmishing of a novel writer [which] can have no effect” in such matters and wherein Smith intimates that women writers will be “united in that cause which must finally triumph – the cause of truth, reason, and humanity” (qtd. in Wollstonecraft 451). As an astute reader and advocate for the power of women writers, Wollstonecraft recognizes the brilliant rhetorical strategy of Smith’s “Preface,” as well as the sheer power of her words.

In her role as mediator between Smith and her readers, she pays Smith the compliment of quotation, joining with her in the hope that their cause will spread to a broader audience. Altogether, this is a glowing review coming from the razor sharp pen of Mary

Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft’s review of Marchmont (1796) also focused on its “Preface,” and it reflects a growing level of interaction with her fellow women authors.45 Here she takes a

45 Marchmont was published in 1796; Wollstonecraft’s review was published in 1797.

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more personal notice of Smith, focusing on her as a fellow author before discussing the content or style of the novel. She responds, essentially, as Smith would have her readers respond to her prefaces—with sympathy toward her circumstances. In this relatively short review, Wollstonecraft opens with a discussion of Smith’s preface before giving a cursory review of the novel. She seems to have been moved equally by Smith’s account of herself as by the novel, for she says “it is to be lamented that talents like hers have not had a more genial sky to ripen under; and that the delightful task of invention has been a labor of patience rather tending to embitter than sooth a wounded mind” (485). Such an altered tone suggests that she identifies deeply with Smith’s role as a woman in the literary marketplace. Her description of the relationship between author and text also suggests that she holds the same view her sister authors do—that author and text operate within a symbiotic relationship where one cannot help but influence the other. Although she does not conflate author with heroine in her discussion of Smith, she does give Smith and her text a joint, sisterly kind of sympathy.

By acknowledging Smith’s personal troubles, she also takes a stand on one of the known controversies surrounding Smith’s authorial persona—she comes down on the side of those who excuse Smith’s choice to share her private life with the public, suggesting that “her manner … of alluding to her domestic sorrows must excite sympathy, and excuse the acrimony with which she execrates, and holds up to contempt, the man to whom she attributes them” (485). In this case, Wollstonecraft uses her public voice to display the kind of sisterly solidarity in the face of patriarchy suggested by Austen in her ‘Defense.’

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As a whole, Wollstonecraft’s reviews of Smith display a wide range of the kinds of responses that she gave to women’s fiction—both positive and negative.

Wollstonecraft saw Smith’s potential and admired her gifts, but believed that these abilities came with a degree of responsibility to the broader community of women. She expected Smith, along with every woman whose words made their way into print, to use her position in the public to forward the situation of all women.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Evolution of Women’s Novels

Wollstonecraft lived out this belief through her reviews and her other writings. In fact, her literary criticism informed her most widely read work, A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman (1792) in countless ways. Viewed chronologically, Rights of Woman reflects her evolving views of the role of the novel in women’s lives and I argue that it occupies an essential place in her engagement in the community of women writers. To place it in terms of the current discussion, Rights of Woman came out between her reviews of Smith’s Desmond and Marchmont. Rights of Woman also proves that, in spite of her frequent protests against specific and bad novels, she did believe they had value, since she wrote her own novels after she penned Rights of Woman. Where

Rights of Woman paints social arguments in broad strokes, aimed at men and patriarchal systems, her critical reviews zero in on specific traits of fiction and literature, often singling out women writers in an overt attempt to raise the standards for their body of writing. However, several themes recur in the reviews and Rights of Woman that reveal a mind always engaged in narrative analysis and the power of language.

As she lays out the plan for Rights of Woman in the “Introduction,” Wollstonecraft makes clear the connections among language, style, genre, and women’s advancement:

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… wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language …— I shall be employed about things, not words!— and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation. (12)

Here Wollstonecraft demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between women’s reading and writing and the way it influences their standing in the world. She also perceives, as

Johnson did in the preface to his Dictionary of the English Language, and Burney did in her caricature of the Insensibilist in Cecilia,46 a connection between the written word and the power women possess to influence public discourse.47 This power to both influence, and be influenced by, writing constitutes a great deal of her message to her female readers in Rights of Woman and throughout her critical reviews. She argues that clear, unaffected language forms the most direct route to respectability and equality for women. Though this may seem like a minor stylistic note, the recurrence of criticism of certain types of language throughout Rights of Woman belies such an assumption.

Wollstonecraft’s ongoing battle against the traps of sensibility and its accompanying language must be viewed carefully in terms of her descriptions of that language. In every case, she deplores not the language itself, but “flowery diction” and other false or exaggerated language (emphasis mine 12). In other words, sensibility is not, in itself, dangerous, nor is the language describing it. Wollstonecraft despises both

46 See Chapter 2 for the discussion of the character of Mr. Meadows, the leader of the “Insensibilists” in Cecilia.

47 Along with Johnson, she considers women’s lack of reason connected with their inability to discern the difference between reason and passions. She understands the danger inherent in this combination, but considers it a result of improper education rather than women’s natural deficiencies. Wollstonecraft’s argument is based upon her belief that women have the capacity to change the course of this trend, whereas Johnson merely decried the downward spiral of corrupt language in all writing. A full discussion of Johnson’s concerns for the future of the English language as they were expressed in his “Preface” to his Dictionary of the English Language can be found in Chapter 2.

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expressions and representations of false sensibilities, including false refinement, or the imitation of emotional sensitivity. In her “Introduction” to Rights of Woman, she says that

“the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement” and later reminds them that

“artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility” will cause women to become “slaves to their bodies” (10, 47). She believes that women’s culturally programmed sensitivity to emotion places them in vulnerable positions. Wollstonecraft considers women unable to advocate for themselves for “weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?— where find strength to recur to reason and rise superiour to a system of oppression?” (124). Instead, she prescribes the balance of reason to provide women safety from victimhood.

Wollstonecraft does take great exception to novels, yet she does so in respect to a general tendency that places a certain type of writing—one dominated by inflated passions that bear little resemblance to the real world—into the hands of young women.

Finally, Wollstonecraft tends to take a broad social view rather than an individual one in her critical approach to writing. Her larger goal in Rights of Woman echoes that of her reviews—she attempts to change current trends by setting new standards for language in a way that will “render [her] sex more respectable members of society” (12). This task, she realizes, must be a relational one. She insists that every broad precept must be proved by example; subsequently, her new arguments should be made clear within the context of the dialogue established in both Rights of Woman and her later novels.

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At one point in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft gestures pointedly at her role as a critic to suggest what mature women might do for the rising generation in the service of educating them through reading—

In this context, she creates a place for women’s novels in women’s education, for within this description of the mentor relationship lies her developing formula for the novel: humorous analysis; a female conversation that takes place through carefully modulated tones; and situations meant to mirror those in which women found themselves in real life. Most importantly, the construct of the “heroic character” represents the newly developing heroine, one who was learning that her destiny could be a bit more secure if she learned to exercise her reason and modulate her emotions.

Wollstonecraft seeks to reshape current forms of the novel by merging it with the conduct book and treatises on education. She does so by developing requirements for representations of women in a way that empowers them to think and act for themselves.

In her critical reviews, this meant examining and criticizing those novels that exalted weak, irrational heroines who reinforced the kinds of behavior that kept women docile and subservient. In Rights of Woman, it meant describing the attributes of a new kind of heroine whose expressions of natural feeling and exercise of reason would teach women to be sensible and rational.

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As she outlines the ways women should comport themselves in Rights of

Woman, she takes many of her cues from novels and the texts of conduct literature.

She claims that she “wish[es] to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures,” and in doing so, makes use of several fictional heroines in her quest to

“effect a revolution in female manners” (83; 49). Through critical analysis, she reshapes these characters for her own purposes. In addition to shaping the figure of the heroine,

Wollstonecraft focuses her analysis on the structure and elements of several genres that may seem incompatible with the novel—conduct books, essays, treatises, and sermons.

In a chapter entitled “Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have

Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” she moves beyond the “few simple principles” of women’s education to focus on these other genres and “the artificial structure [that] has been raised with so much ingenuity, that it seems necessary to attack it in a more circumstantial manner” (83). Her criticism of women’s novels must be understood in the context of her criticism of the books written by “men of genius,” like

Rousseau, to whom she addresses whole sections of Rights of Woman in the style of a point-counterpoint dialogue. Her concern “that the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement; that the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions” should be considered to work in both directions in determining the ramifications of her ongoing negotiations toward better writing. She does not criticize all women’s novels—only those that qualify as “frivolous productions” and that mimic patriarchal treatment of women by “treat[ing] them as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species” (10). Wollstonecraft’s

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criticisms encompass all “works which have been particularly written for [women’s] improvement,” and should therefore be considered within the historical context of a patriarchy that informs these works (10). In a sense, Wollstonecraft’s use of multiple forms of writing in Rights of Woman reflects the immense social relevance of the written word as a representative of unspoken assumptions about gender. She revisits these assumptions by making them plain, dissecting them, and employing them to her advantage as tools in her argument.

Throughout Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft employs narrative and characterization to work through her arguments, especially since several of her arguments are based upon counterarguments that have themselves been constructed upon narrative. For example, she spends a great deal of time arguing against

Rousseau’s Emile, or A Treatise on Education. Rousseau, whom she greatly admires,

“give[s] a sex to [a] mind” and creates “ridiculous stories, which tend to prove that girls are naturally attentive to their persons, without laying any stress on daily example, [and] are below contempt” (46). Wollstonecraft’s call for examples in the Treatise amounts to a demand for an improved narrative. In its current form, Rousseau works out the applicability of each argument within a drama in miniature, complete with characters, events, crisis, and resolution. Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Rousseau’s argument centers upon a deconstruction of the main character of Sophia. As she reiterates throughout her critical reviews, her primary standard for both situation and characterization is realism, or what is “natural” or “unnatural.” Rousseau’s situations, or examples, fall short precisely because the character of Sophia is faulty. In this, as in many other ways,

Rousseau disappoints her—

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Rousseau, for his character of Sophia is, undoubtedly, a captivating one, though it appears to me grossly unnatural; however it is not the superstructure, but the foundation of her character, the principles on which her education was built, that I mean to attack … Is this the man who delights to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out of itself?— How are these mighty sentiments lowered when he describes the pretty foot and enticing airs of his little favourite! (27, 28)

Her disapproval of Rousseau’s portrait lies in his blindness to the inherent self-interest of the patriarchal characterization of women, for his reason seems to escape him when it comes to satisfying his baser needs. She gives multiple examples of this trend of characterization throughout Rights of Woman in order to highlight the need for change.

The “fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists” has “sacrifice[d]

… truth and sincerity” in the service of man’s interests (5). Wollstonecraft argues for a redefinition of these foundational principles—truth, sincerity, virtue—in order to realign them with Nature, since men have made them “a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility … shaping [them] to their own convenience” (55). This final point, that men are “shaping” women’s education for “their own convenience” rather than considering the dignity of women, reinforces the need for foundational changes in narrative.

As she responds to Rousseau’s faulty narrative, Wollstonecraft constructs both proto-type and counter-narrative, one that serves as a precursor to her novels. She first explains the result of Rousseau’s education on women—a straying wife incapable of educating her children—before presenting an alternative: “I must relieve myself by drawing a different picture. Let fancy now present a woman with a tolerable understanding […] her mind, at the same time, gradually expanding itself to

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comprehend the moral duties of life, and in what human virtue and dignity consist” (54).

Here is her “attack” on Rousseau’s Sophia at its very foundation, for where he constructs a vain young woman whose greatest concern is playing with dolls and dressing herself, Wollstonecraft re-creates a woman capable of expanding her mind, cultivating her virtue, and taking pleasure in the fulfillment of her moral duties. From this point, Wollstonecraft rejects the woman whose interaction with the opposite sex depends upon Rousseau’s imagined coy seductions. Her ideal woman instead “marries from affection, without losing sight of prudence, and looking beyond matrimonial felicity secures her husband’s respect before it is necessary to exert mean arts to please him and feed a dying flame,” allowing “friendship and forbearance [to] take place of a more ardent affection” (54). When fate leaves her Heroine a widow – another harsh but common reality – though she is “without a sufficient provision […] she is not desolate!

[because] her heart turns to her children with redoubled fondness, and anxious to provide for them, affection gives a sacred heroic cast to her maternal duties” (54). Once again, Wollstonecraft’s requirement for education furnishes women with the skills necessary to be virtuous mothers rather than superfluous widows, the common plague of both fiction and reality. She closes her story with a quaint tableau—

I think I see her surrounded by her children, reaping the reward of her care […] whilst health and innocence smile on their chubby cheeks, and as they grow up the cares of life are lessened by their grateful attention. She lives to see the virtues which she endeavoured to plant on principles, fixed into habits, to see her children attain a strength of character sufficient to enable them to endure adversity without forgetting their mother’s example. (55)

Wollstonecraft’s character sketch forms the basis of the novel she demands from women writers through her critical reviews, one that is most useful to its female readers

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as preparation for the world in which they live rather than one of fancy. This character and narrative also echo many of her critical reviews, including her sharp criticism of

Lady Adelina in Smith’s Emmeline, as we have seen above, who chose to find solace in the love of a man other than her husband rather than be content with her duty as a mother when her husband disappointed her. Her heroine is long-suffering, duty-bound, and grounded in the harshness of reality.

Whatever we now know about Wollstonecraft’s personal life that may seem to conflict with her teachings on morality and virtue,48 I believe she deserves to be taken at her word in regards to her intentions for young women. Her advice that they maintain control of their passions by focusing on their sense of duty stems from a genuine concern for their ability to maintain autonomy in a society that made them a commodity.

In remaking the woman-heroine in the image of duty to family and society rather than in subservience to man, she paves the way for her “revolution in female manners” which will “restore to them their lost dignity — and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world” (49). From a broader social perspective, Wollstonecraft argues that such a woman-heroine, given an equal and proper education, can only benefit her family and, in doing so, her society.

Wollstonecraft’s mission to alter the perception of women led her to criticize anyone who misrepresented their abilities and innate qualities. Although she focuses most of her criticism in Rights of Woman on texts written by men, she does not excuse

48 The discovery of Wollstonecraft’s infatuation with a married man named Henry Fusseli and her liaison with William Godwin before their marriage were touted after her death as proof that her radical teachings about women’s equality and rights were unsound and would only lead to sexual vice and a rejection of religion.

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women writers for following in the footsteps of patriarchal discourse. She claims that those who “argue in the same track as men, and adopt the [same] sentiments … brutalize them [women], with all the pertinacity of ignorance” (108).49 Wollstonecraft’s use of the word “brutalize” evokes images of abuse and her particular notice of some women writers who have been complicit with patriarchal narratives of women’s capabilities is particularly damning. At its sharpest, her critical voice cannot be seen as one supportive of all women writers; however, she certainly strove to shape women as a political community, as it had the capacity to raise the standards and situation for them all. Close attention to the places where she addresses the novel as a genre reveals that her overall focus is not so much on individual writers as on the effect they have on women as a population—women as readers:

These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive, like the lurking particles of fire which are supposed universally to pervade matter. (192)

49 She lists Ms. Piozzi as the most notable offender, for perpetuating the masculine belief that women are made to please and will move on to other men if they are not continually flattered by their husbands. Her remaining comments seem more like critical reviews than direct arguments, for they are arranged like a list and seem to lack a unifying thesis. Baroness de Stael has written a “eulogium on Rousseau” of which she disapproves; Madame de Genlis “has written several entertaining books for children; and her Letters on Education afford many useful hints, that sensible parents will certainly avail themselves of; but her views are narrow, and her prejudices as unreasonable as strong.” She ends far from where she begins, praising women writers to whom she believes respect is due. “Mrs. Chapone’s Letters are written with such good sense, and unaffected humility, and contain so many useful observations, that I only mention them to pay the worthy writer this tribute of respect. I cannot, it is true, always coincide in opinion with her; but I always respect her.” She mentions a few women to praise them, but sees much more value in criticism than praise. She reserves her warmest praise for Mrs. Macaulay, whose works on education she refers as a whole worth reading, and to Mrs. Barbauld’s Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose as most noteworthy.

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As with Austen’s ‘Defense,’ Wollstonecraft engages multiple players in this fiery critique—including uneducated readers and several generations of misguided writers.

However, Wollstonecraft does not include all writers in this condemnation, only those who do not represent true human nature. The tell-tale sign of such novels, as she delineates it, is “sentimental jargon” which causes an insidious corruption of taste and a manipulation of the heart of its readers. The final line is most telling, for here she reveals the underlying cause of such injury—a lack of proper education. Only women whose “understanding …ha[s] never been exercised” are susceptible to such manipulations. She later reiterates this point in clearer terms—“Yet when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination” (193).

Ultimately, I find kinship rather than difference in Wollstonecraft’s impulse to insist upon higher standards for women’s texts; her technique is different, yet she and her fellow authors have the same goals in mind. When it comes to the effects of reading on the mind and manners of women, all of Wollstonecraft’s writings, alongside the writings of Burney, Smith, Edgeworth, and Austen, demonstrate a similar concern for their female readers as individuals and as a community.

Wollstonecraft demonstrates throughout Rights of Woman the ways that these ends can be achieved through the “right” kind of reading. It follows, then, that her prescriptive statements form a model. The examples she creates for her own argument become in her novels exemplary characters, a new brand of Heroine who operates to enact change or “a revolution” not just “in female manners” but in the “woven web” that makes up the new novel, and the fabric of a new society.

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Writing the Revolutionary Novel – Wollstonecraft’s Prefaces

Wollstonecraft makes her most overt statements in her own novels. In the

“Preface” to her first novel Mary, a Fiction (1788), she solidifies many of her developing critical theories for and about women and fiction. She begins by distinguishing her work as “a fiction,” by emphasizing its connection to and difference from the much contested genre of the novel. In most cases, she equates the novel with “sentimental fiction’s overwrought language and behavioral code of extreme emotional response” – in other words, most novels are just Romances in disguise (Myers “Wollstonecraft’s Reviews”

83). Her views of Romance are best summed up in her review of Mrs. Elizabeth

Norman’s The Child of Woe. There, she refuses to apologize for dismissing the work as

“a truly feminine novel,” thereby classing it with “the generality of them [that] are so akin to each other, that with a few very trifling alterations, the same review would serve for almost all of them” (82). The ingredients of this breed of novel she lists as “[u]nnatural characters, improbable incidents, sad tales of woe rehearsed in an affected, half-prose, half-poetical style, exquisite double-refined sensibility, dazzling beauty, and elegant drapery, to adorn a celestial body” (82). Her reviews dealt heavy blows to this rank of novel. Wollstonecraft set out to distinguish her writing as far from these works as possible.

Wollstonecraft draws her novel and its Heroine against this common breed of

“feminine” novels. In the opening of the “Advertisement,” she positions her “fiction” among other texts in order to frame her discussion of gender: “In delineating the

Heroine of this Fiction, the Author attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed … [and from the] various modifications of these models” that, in their attempts to tell the same stories of courtship in the lives of the women in them

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“wander from nature” (par. 1). Wollstonecraft distinguishes her text by making a pointed connection between genre and the development of “a character” and, more specifically of “the Heroine” (par. 1).

Wollstonecraft makes another unique move by highlighting this intention in a direct address to her readers. Perhaps Austen intended her novels to center on the development of her Heroines, but she never addresses her readers directly nor makes this claim overtly. As we’ve seen earlier, Burney and Smith’s discussions of genre tended to focus on style, form, and the relative morality of a work rather than the

Heroine. Burney called her work a “moral tale” and a “novel,” defining good novels in general as having “knowledge,” “eloquence,” “pathetic powers,” “wit,” and “humour”

(Evelina 9). Smith comes closer to Wollstonecraft’s formulation in the “Preface” of

Desmond, when she defends the moral choices of her Heroine. However, when Smith makes a pointed reference to the purview of the novel, she considers her choice to discuss political matters as the most relevant marker of genre. Among this group,

Wollstonecraft makes a unique attempt to restructure the novel by proclaiming openly her intention to create a novel by and for women. This shift allowed her to work out her ideas about women, reason, and education through character. By making a woman the

Heroine of the novel—in the same way that a male protagonist had been the Hero on a hero’s journey of development—she could resituate the faulty power structures

“generally portrayed.”

As part of the ongoing debates over the novel, Wollstonecraft essentially sub- categorizes Mary, a Fiction in an effort to define what she considers important and to choose her critical heritage. Other potential subcategories were “a Tale,” “a History,” or

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the dreaded “Romance,” each holding their own connotations and potential expectations by a novel-hungry audience (par. 1). To further categorize her work, she discusses both male and female authors who have influenced the novel. First, she claims that her

Heroine is neither Rousseau’s “Sophia,” nor Richardson’s “Clarissa,” or “Lady G—” nor, by default any of “the various modifications of these models” (par. 1). So while the bulk of the “Advertisement” is aimed at (presumably) women “artists” who “wander from nature when they copy the originals of great masters,” she first locates the “Heroine” in the novels of men (par. 1). In this case, Wollstonecraft refers to human nature, which to her encompasses natural human feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and responses to situations. In novels, to write “from nature” also means to present incidents that are probable and similar to ‘real’ life rather than those that seem fantastical or improbable.

Wollstonecraft’s claims for style and character suggest that she wishes to accomplish two things. First, she wants to make clear what a Heroine should not be.

Next she wants to give women writers the goal of enacting change by transforming the women in their novels, which echoes her call for a “revolution in female manners” in A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (49). Wollstonecraft’s Heroine in Mary will draw her sentiments from “nature,” and show “grace” rather than “affectation” (par. 1). Such a

Heroine reflects the “subtle spirit” of her author (par. 1). Wollstonecraft conflates this

Heroine with her author, since both “wish to speak for themselves, and not to be an echo—even of the sweetest sounds—or the sublimest beams” of others (par. 3). These images tie into her conception of the “vivifying principle” that must enliven any production that will not become “insipid” and die (par. 3). Wollstonecraft aligns herself here with the concepts of Romantic genius, yet her “vivifying principle” relies first upon a

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dismissal of patriarchal influence and insists upon women’s equal capacity for unmediated inspiration. After all, she claims that the novel must be driven by “the mind of a woman, with thinking powers” rather than the kind of woman she so often derided in her reviews (par. 5). Such words resonate with the discourse of the day, in which “the female organs have been thought too weak” for the “power” of thought (par. 5). Her novel, however, was to be “an artless tale, without episodes” in order to foreground the strength and development of the female mind (par. 5). By adding Romantic notions of genius and inspiration, Wollstonecraft raises the bar and insists that both author and

Heroine are capable of rationality and original thought. By extension and suggestion, she posits the same for her readers.

Within Wollstonecraft’s desire for simplicity lies recognition of the power of the printed word and its ability to counteract established thought with the “possibilities” of the minds of women (emphasis in original par. 5). After all, “in a fiction such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is derived from the operation of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source”

(par. 5). In Wollstonecraft’s ideal novel, a woman should be an active subject, the originator of thought and action rather than the passive object portrayed in so many patriarchal fictions. Here again, she speaks for author and Heroine, for in drawing such an “individual from the original source” (par. 5) the writer has harnessed the power of the pen, and found the “vivifying principle” that inhabits true art (par. 3). Her concept of genius founded in the reasoning powers of women is both unique and revolutionary. As an early novel, Mary reflects Wollstonecraft’s sense of the possibilities for women in

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fiction and in society—the radical idea that women could actively engage their minds rather than be passive receptors in the reading and writing processes.

Wollstonecraft published Mary in 1788, the same year she began writing for the

Analytical Review. Her next novel, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, was still a work in progress nine years later when she died in 1797. Wollstonecraft’s last printed review was of Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the Eighteenth Century

(1796). Like her earlier reviews of Smith’s novels, she admires Robinson, who was also known as a poet, and admits that as a writer she “possesses considerable abilities”

(523). However, she remains unrelenting in her crusade against the subgenre of

‘Romance,’ claiming that Robinson has “fallen into an errour, common to people of lively fancy …[and] [t]he consequence is obvious; her sentences are often confused, entangled with superfluous words, half-expressed sentiments, and false ornaments”

(523). This review was printed in May of 1797, only five months before Wollstonecraft’s death, and during the time she was working on Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman. Thus, her note at the end of this review that “the writing of a good book is no easy task” may well be understood in the context of her own writing (523). She was, at the time, wrestling with living up to her own standard, to express sentiments without words that might be construed as superfluous or – even more damning – unrepresentative of true human nature. She saw plenty of bad books and mediocre novels pass across her desk, but her own novel became a struggle that outlived her.

In Maria she attempts to bring her Rights of Woman to life. Since the manuscript remained unfinished at her death, we have an incomplete “Advertisement,” pieced together by her husband, William Godwin in a form that is a partial reproduction of her

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draft for the preface combined with parts of original letters to a friend. These initial conceptions, which give us formative and somewhat contradictory thoughts, leave us with the same tantalizing loose ends that haunted their author in her trouble with resolving the novel. Essentially, how could she tell her audience what to think of a novel that she did not know what to think of herself?

She declares in her draft of the “Preface,” that her “main object [is] the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (5). However, the means she hopes to employ “the portray[al] of passions rather than manners” and “the delineation of finer sensations,” which, while she certainly meant to render them lifelike and unaffected, must have made it difficult to avoid sensationalism, since her topic was “misery and oppression” (5,

6).

One major aspect of her dilemma involved the role that female friendship played in the conclusion of the novel. One version of the ending suggests her belief in the possibility that women might rely upon one another for comfort and a form of independence in the world. In this ending, Maria and her friend Jemima take Maria’s children and maintain a household apart from the men who have wronged them. The other ending resigns itself to the futility of women’s position within current systems of patriarchy. In this ending, Maria commits suicide because she believes that her only redemption lies beyond the grave. Perhaps Wollstonecraft wanted to revert to the ideal scenario in Rights of Woman, wherein the passions subdued themselves into resignation. Yet natural, realistic passions seem to rear their heads in the text, dangerous in their ramifications for women, yet no less irresistible.

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The pragmatist and the lover of poetic realism seem to be at war in this unfinished manuscript. Godwin tells us that where the narrative ends, Wollstonecraft’s notes indicate divergent possibilities, but only one of them had inspired bits of actual prose. He leaves this fact for the reader’s contemplation, but it is a compelling argument for what might have become Wollstonecraft’s final choice. In this narrative, as the main character Maria contemplates suicide, she considers the ramifications of her choice on the people in her life. Her mind seems to catch upon the image and idea of her children as those most in need of her:

—one remembrance with frightful velocity followed another—All the incidents of her life were in arms, embodied to assail her, and prevent her sinking into the sleep of death.—Her murdered child again appeared to her, mourning for the babe of which she was the tomb.—'And could it have a nobler?—Surely it is better to die with me, than to enter on life without a mother's care!—I cannot live!—but could I have deserted my child the moment it was born? (136)

Thus in spite of her disillusionment with the world, and what she earlier referred to as

“the troubled wave of life,” she understands the necessity for relationships between mothers and daughters, and the need for the protection and education that women can provide for one another (164). A moment later, her friend Jemima enters with her lost daughter, the “babe” she thought was dead—

Maria gazed wildly at her, her whole frame was convulsed with emotion; when the child, whom Jemima had been tutoring all the journey, uttered the word 'Mamma!' She caught her to her bosom, and burst into a passion of tears—then, resting the child gently on the bed, as if afraid of killing it,— she put her hand to her eyes, to conceal as it were the agonizing struggle of her soul. She remained silent for five minutes, crossing her arms over her bosom, and reclining her head,—then exclaimed: 'The conflict is over!—I will live for my child!' (137)

In this version of the novel, Wollstonecraft chooses to render extreme emotion and then reroute it into a two female relationships, a bond of friendship with Jemima and the bond

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of motherhood with her daughter. Claudia Johnson explains Jemima’s function in Maria as “a turn toward solidarity and affective community even with the most despised and unlovely of women [and] suggests an alternative to the disastrousness of heterosocial relations” (“Wollstonecraft’s Novels” 204). By choosing a life apart from men, Maria and

Jemima successfully create a safe female space wherein women can build upon and strengthen their bonds. Ironically, Maria contains the same emotional language and scenes Wollstonecraft previously criticized in Smith’s Emmeline nearly ten years earlier.

Perhaps Wollstonecraft’s indecisiveness shows a crisis of faith in the capability of women to achieve such ends in the face of the incredibly powerful legal and emotional opposition she has faced in the real world. Nonetheless, it does show that she contemplated the possibility that women’s independence was not incompatible with the interconnectedness of female community.

After Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin published Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman along with The Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. He based the Memoirs on her journals, letters, but he also filled in much of its content from his very intimate knowledge of her life—including her ongoing infatuation with a married man named Henry Fuseli, a pregnancy out of wedlock from her relationship with Gilbert

Imlay, and her unconventional living arrangements with him prior to their marriage

(Patten). The publication of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous Memoirs destroyed her public reputation. Although Godwin’s intention was to pay homage to his wife’s genius, his insistence on disclosing her “sexual entanglements, her suicide attempts, and her unorthodox religious opinions … [was] greedily seized by the conservative press for a brutal propaganda campaign” (Myers “Godwin’s Memoirs” 301). Wollstonecraft was

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already associated with feminist ideas, so the Memoirs simply gave credence to arguments that feminism and moral degradation went hand in hand. Thanks to writers and reviewers like Richard Polwhele, Wollstonecraft, who was “the intrepid champion of her sex,” was branded the woman “whom no decorum checks” (“Unsex’d Females” 13).

One review of the Memoirs, which the reviewer retitles creatively The Philosopher

Godwin’s History of the Propensities, Amours, and Adventures of his own Wife, turns

Godwin’s claim that Wollstonecraft’s life be held up as an example into a jab, sneering that her life “does not teach what it is wise to pursue, it manifests what it is wise to avoid. It illustrates both the sentiments and conduct resulting from those principles as those of Miss Wollstonecraft and Mr. Godwin” (The historical, biographical, literary, and scientific magazine, etc. 27-28). Through a literary reference to a character in Tom

Jones, the reviewer labels Wollstonecraft a prostitute (28). He follows up with accusations about her lack of proper filial piety, her lack of patriotic feeling, and her incorrect religious beliefs, or “irreligion,” a point upon which he expands extensively (28,

30, 34).

This barrage of vitriolic press affected all women writers who expressed feminist ideas, as they too could be said to be part of Polwhele’s “female band despising

NATURE's law,” whom he manages to simultaneously over-sexualize and de-sexualize by branding them “unsex’d” (7). In fact, one of the great ironies of Wollstonecraft’s afterlife is the misconstruction, or intentional misunderstanding, of her arguments about women’s essential natures.50 Her continual insistence on realism for the sake of

50 Mitzi Myers sums up the critical consensus in “Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject,”—“Accounts by a surviving intimate seem prone to generate controversy, but few can have been so destructive to the principals of those involved. The Memoirs inadvertently established a

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presenting a rational picture of women was used against her. Accusations of

“masculinity” surfaced before her death, but they assumed a much darker tone afterward. She addressed them in Rights of Woman by dealing with gendered language and even attacking the term itself:

I am aware of an obvious inference:— from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;— all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine. (11)

Through rational discourse, she hoped to neutralize this gendered language and redefine it on human terms, by labeling “talents and virtues that enoble the mind” as gender-neutral qualities (11). However, after her death, these claims for women’s education and innate abilities were turned against them, and as Polwhele’s poem shows, many of the conservative portions of society rendered them “unsex’d,” dehumanizing women to the status of animals—a freakish, aggressive, decidedly unfeminine group of “hyena[s] in petticoats” (“Unsex’d Females”). Women writers such as Smith, who had begun to find freedom in expressing political opinions, along with those named in Polwhele’s poem, risked being grouped in with Wollstonecraft’s disgrace.

damaging image of Wollstonecraft which yoked feminism with sexual profligacy … the tainted character of Wollstonecraft in the popular mind lasted well into the Victorian era” (302).

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Edgeworth’s Textual Nexus

Since Maria Edgeworth’s career was beginning just as Wollstonecraft’s was drawing to a close – and right around the time of her death – her early works provide unique perspectives on the influence Wollstonecraft had on the community of women writers as well as the changing relationships they had to develop with their women readers. Specifically, Edgeworth became an example of the way women writers, who had already always employed a multi-vocal approach to authorship, developed even more complex strategies as the eighteenth century drew to a close in their efforts to forward the cause of women’s rights to equality in education, in the literary world, in the home, and eventually on the broader public stage of politics.

In my examination of the mid-eighteenth century, I discussed the methods used by both Burney and Smith through multiple prefaces, revisions, and novels that allowed them to forward new conceptions of genre and women’s claims to authorship. Writing closer to the end of the eighteenth century, Edgeworth found the need to add greater complexity to these strategies. At times her authorial voice seems almost schizophrenic, ranging from a strong feminist tone that resonates with Wollstonecraft’s core principles, to a meek and conservative whisper that contradicts many of the things she stated in other texts. I believe that these variations can be explained in part by the way her career spans across the tumult of the 1790s and, at the same time, by the ways that she learned from the women before her who had to employ multi-vocal strategies in order to maintain respectability in an adversarial literary environment. Edgeworth carries their strategies far beyond the multi-tonal prefatory narratives, shifting her arguments into characters and playing with conventions of genre in new ways that inspired women after her.

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In The Parent’s Assistant (1796), which Edgeworth published anonymously, she makes use of her “Preface, Addressed to Parents” to establish her approach to education. In it, she challenges the great Dr. Johnson’s theories of the role of fiction in education. She positions her argument by borrowing the “authority” of one man to counteract another. The first line of the “Preface” states boldly that “[a] motto from

Aristotle may appear pedantic, but it was chosen merely to oppose such high authority to the following assertions of Dr. Johnson” (a2). Once she has established her right to criticize him, she chastises Johnson for his “illiberal attack on a celebrated female writer,” citing his own contradictory statements (a2-3). Following the style of

Wollstonecraft’s arguments in Rights of Woman, she sets up masculine arguments before negating them and rebuilding her own with their primary components, especially those core ideas that transcend gender and class—“justice, truth, and humanity” (vii).51

This passage bears an uncanny resemblance to one in Rights of Woman, in which

Wollstonecraft argues that the core values of “truth, justice, and humanity,” once established through “practice,” will sustain anyone when they meet with adversity in life

(141). Edgeworth’s concurrence with Wollstonecraft in this text is remarkable in two ways. First, when Wollstonecraft reviewed it near the end of her life, she heartily approved of it, first praising Edgeworth’s “pertinent remarks on the crude manner in which even men of abilities have declaimed against experiments in education” (476).

She pays Edgeworth the high compliment of extensive direct quotation, introducing it by

51 This passage also echoes Charlotte Smith’s closing comment in the “Preface” to Desmond, of which Wollstonecraft thought very highly. Smith says her political commentary, along with that of those who speak for the cause of revolution is “united in that cause which must finally triumph—the cause of truth, justice, and humanity” (ix).

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saying that “we shall bring forward our opinion in his own words,” thereby emphasizing her hearty approbation of the text (476). Such an introduction brings out the second singularity of this review, for Edgeworth’s anonymity, along with the fact that it was a first publication, led Wollstonecraft to assume that the author was a man. Oddly, though the title page of the second edition (which was published the same year) contains no indication of authorship, the review attributes the text to “E.M.” (475).52 Even the forward-thinking Mary Wollstonecraft imagined that an author brave enough to criticize

Johnson in such a brazen manner must be a man.

The final point upon which Edgeworth concurs with Wollstonecraft in this early text is the choice of natural incidents rather than fantastic ones. While she agrees with the need for the form of narrative “to prevent the precepts of morality from tiring the ear and mind, [as] it [is] necessary to make the stories in which they are introduced in some measure dramatic; to keep alive hope, and curiosity,” she follows Wollstonecraft’s belief that an author should “avoid inflaming the imagination, or exciting a restless sense of adventure, by exhibiting false views of life, and creating hopes which, in the ordinary course of things, cannot be realized” (x-xi). She returns to Johnson to make this point –

“not from a spirit of contradiction, but from a fear that his authority should establish dangerous errors” by conveying lessons or entertainment in the form of “fairies and giants and enchanters [which] are not to be met in the real world” (xi). With delightfully witty sarcasm, Edgeworth concludes by mocking Johnson’s reputation. She implores

52 This edition is the only text to which I have access. At this point, I can only guess that either the first edition included the initials E.M. (Maria Edgeworth’s initials in reverse) on the frontispiece, or Wollstonecraft came by faulty information about the authorship of the text. I will only underscore that these editions were published the same year, which indicates that the first edition sold quickly, prompting the publisher to print a second run. Given these circumstances, it is unlikely that any changes were made to the text.

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her audience to join with her in the hope “that the magic of Dr. Johnson’s name will not have the power to restore the reign of the fairies” (xii). She offers her text, and by extension the works of more rational women writers, as an alternative to such masculine constructions.

Letters for Literary Ladies (1795, 1799) paints an equally interesting picture of the changes in Edgeworth’s voice before and after Wollstonecraft’s death, (see Table

2.1 below) for while her argument remains consistent, vast stylistic changes in the second edition (1799) make her seem less threatening as a public figure. Just as

Wollstonecraft does in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Letters for Literary Ladies experiments with the blending of genres, combining the dialectical nature of the epistolary form with the argumentative essay which, as I’ve discussed, also includes narrative elements. This alternative format gives Edgeworth some flexibility in her revisions of the second edition. The second edition shows her early response to the changing social climate after Wollstonecraft’s death.

Table 2-1. Relationship between Edgeworth’s publications and Wollstonecraft’s death 1795 Edgeworth. Letters for Literary Ladies. (First Edition)

1796 Edgeworth. The Parent’s Assistant.

1797 Wollstonecraft’s death, 10 September

1798 Wollstonecraft. Wrongs of Women. (unfinished manuscript) published

posthumously

[William Godwin publishes Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs]

Maria Edgeworth and R.L. Edgeworth (her father). Practical Education.

1799 Edgeworth. Letters for Literary Ladies (heavily revised Second Edition)

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The first edition of Letters for Literary Ladies, published in 1795, offers a straightforward argument for women’s education that nonetheless demonstrates an awareness of the current masculine arguments against it. The title page offers only the publisher’s name and the title of an accompanying essay to the readers. Edgeworth does not include her name, nor does she include any prefatory materials. The text consists of two letters; the first is written by “A Gentleman,” who presents himself as a concerned friend “upon the birth of a daughter”; the second is an “Answer to the

Preceding Letter.” Edgeworth sets out her arguments by presenting the reasons against educating daughters in the guise of the concerns of the first letter writer; in the second letter, she presents counterarguments via the responses of the new father. The key components of Wollstonecraft’s arguments for women’s equality are laid out in full through this text, particularly in the form of phrases and sentiments repeated by the first letter writer, a contentious gentleman who has heard them in public debate. Using this technique, Edgeworth can give the arguments in full, unadorned form. As a criticism, the first letter writer calls his friend a “champion for the rights of woman [who] insist[s] upon the equality of the sexes” (2-3). He anticipates his friend’s assertions that women’s errors in judgment are “originally occasioned by the subjection and ignorance in which they had previously been held” (13). Most importantly, he recognizes that the core of his friend’s claims for the equality of women rests upon the idea that “women are reasonable creatures, [that] they should be governed only by reason; and that we disgrace ourselves, and enslave them when we instill even the most useful truths as prejudices … we should not require human beings to submit to any laws or customs,

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without convincing their understandings of the universal utility of political conventions”

(16-17). This representation, spoken with overblown contempt, could not be more explicit in its representation of Wollstonecraft’s arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Naturally, a discerning public knows very well that an author’s sentiments may be expressed by either “side” in a mock debate. Nonetheless, depending upon the tone of the finished text, it is equally possible that the public will hold Edgeworth to account for the letter of response, since it is meant to counter the first. She does so with a systematic, logical, point-by-point counter argument to the first letter that reads much more like an essay than a letter.

Edgeworth says in her “Advertisement” to the second edition (1799)53 that she made extensive revisions to the second letter because the first version’s argument

“upon the advantages of cultivating the female understanding, was thought to weaken the cause it was intended to support” (iv-v). The title page to this edition bears her name, and reminds her readers that she is now a respected author by adding, she is the

“Author of Practical Education and The Parent’s Assistant.” Perhaps she realized that the very precept she espoused, that “[m]orality should …be found[ed] upon demonstration, not upon sentiment” had not been enacted in the first version (16).54

53 As far as I can ascertain, this date has been misprinted as 1798 since the early 1800s in the few critical texts where a second edition is mentioned at all. Next year, I will be putting together an article outlining the details of this mistake based on my review of original documents during research for this project. Although the scholarly discrepancy makes for an interesting discovery, of equal interest is the lack of critical attention to the many, significant alterations Edgeworth made to the second edition. Most critics tend to make use of the first version as the “authoritative” text without any mention of the second. Even Edgeworth’s foremost biographer Marilyn Butler pays minimal attention to Letters for Literary Ladies and makes no mention of the printing or existence of a second edition in Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972). In spite of its age, Butler’s text is still treated by contemporary scholars as the authoritative biography.

54 Edgeworth makes this statement in the first edition and leaves it unaltered in the second.

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Instead, in the very act of arguing for “the female right to literature,” she had ignored the use of any of its conventions (v). As evidence, the greatest change she makes is to begin with, and focus on, narrative and example rather than direct argument in the second letter. For example, in the first edition, the letter of response begins with a focus on the character of the letter writer, followed by a systematic and direct refutation of his friend’s arguments against women’s education (45). The writer openly acknowledges and redirects the attack on his position as a defender of “the rights of women” within a paragraph (45). In the revised second edition, the writer opens his letter with a response to one of the anecdotes used by his “friend” in the first letter—that of a husband made miserable by his “lady’s learning” (43). He carries this example through, in narrative form, using and expanding it to counter the arguments with logic and sense. In fact, the second edition, although it makes a systematic argument, makes use of examples, anecdotes, or references to literature for nearly every point. In comparison, the letter writer in the first version makes little attempt to explicate his abstract arguments by giving examples, telling stories, or making allusions to the narratives of others.

Edgeworth’s global stylistic revisions focus entirely on a shift to narrative, which reflects a degree of distance from masculine styles of argumentation; it also shows a degree of trust in the expanding conventions of women’s fiction.

Additionally, although the first version includes an argument for the social benefits of women’s education, the second places far more emphasis on this point by giving repeated examples of it. Edgeworth further expounds upon this argument by accentuating the way women’s relationships encourage the social bonds that make this possible. In the first draft, the writer says, almost contentiously,

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Do not, my dear Sir, call me ‘a champion for the rights of women’; I am more intent upon their happiness than ambitious to enter into a metaphysical discussion of their rights. Their happiness is so nearly connected with ours, that is seems absurd to manage any argument so as to set the two sexes at variance by vain contention for superiority. (46)

She keeps this segment in the second version, but she places it near the end, after she has made several initial arguments that lend emphasis to the idea of the connectedness of women’s happiness to the happiness of men, and to society as a whole. The letter writer explains to his friend that he will educate his daughter to understand “the necessary connection between her virtues and her happiness … [and] shew her how they are indispensably connected with the largest interests of society” (64-65). Thus, though her argument for education has not changed, Edgeworth makes a subtle shift in the emphasis of domesticity and social connectedness in order to divert attention away from masculine fears of “that daring spirit which despises the common forms of society, and which breaks through the reserve and delicacy of female manners” (65). In a post-

Wollstonecraftian, scandal-plagued society, female delicacy had to be maintained within any argument for equality. The answer was to reinforce women’s domestic roles.

Edgeworth’s change in narrative format reflects this retraction of more overt arguments for women’s literary endeavors. It also reinforces her increasing tendency toward a duality of voice and the interplay of gender expectations that finds its full iteration in her novels. Here is where the exemplary novel, the conduct book, and the argumentative essay seem to brush shoulders. As she transitions her arguments into a narrative format, her authorial voice splits, paving the way for more subversive techniques to undermine patriarchy in her novels.

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In fact, the other noticeable change to the second edition contains a direct tie to her second novel. On the frontispiece, Edgeworth adds a stanza from a poem, which she incorrectly titles “Lord Lyttleton’s Monody.” The poem, the correct title of which is

“To the Memory of a Lady Lately Deceased. A Monody,” written by Lord Lyttleton, was a well-known pastoral elegy. She later uses the stanza immediately following this one as an epigraph for Belinda. Her choice to return to this poem shows her preoccupation with the figure of the ‘perfect’ woman as Lyttleton paints her. Edgeworth first uses the figure of Lady Lyttleton to temper the effect of her argument for women’s education, focusing particularly on the masculine fear of women’s loss of inhibition or modesty. Presumably,

Edgeworth could safely expect her audience to be familiar enough with the full context of the poem to connect the reference of her single stanza with Lyttleton’s dearly-beloved wife, who has

A Wit, that temperately bright, With inoffensive Light All pleasing shone, nor ever past The decent Bounds that Wisdom's sober Hand, And sweet Benevolence's mild Command, And bashful Modesty, before it cast. (“To the Memory of a Lady lately Deceased. A Monody” 170-175)

Lyttleton’s “Monody” attempts to “give [his] burden'd Heart Relief/ And pour forth all [his]

Stores of Grief” by dissecting for the reader the various qualities of a wife that made her presence in his life so dear (7-8). As a whole, the poem portrays Lady Lyttleton as a character subsumed in a masculine narrative. His descriptions of her physical form and her character incorporate her in the estate and its surrounding lands, transmuting her into property rather than allowing her to maintain autonomous subjectivity.

Comparatively, Edgeworth’s selection zeroes in on the one stanza that extolls the

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qualities of the lady’s mind and character. She takes up the female figure as it has been drawn out in parts by a man, and carves out with the skill of a surgeon the aspects she wishes to hold up for scrutiny within her own narrative, thereby rejecting the purely masculine view of women. As it relates to Letters for Literary Ladies, the stanza directs attention to the changes she has made to soften the argument for women’s education, for everywhere that the father says he will give his daughter literary instruction, he adds that he will also teach her modesty and temperance. After all, Lady Lyttleton stands as a model of modesty, who stays within “bounds,” and is “inoffensive.” However, even the revised argument of the second letter does not submit entirely to such a limited picture.

Her literary endeavors prepare her to be a wife and mother, but they also prepare her to be happy as an unmarried woman or, if married, to sustain herself later in life as a widow.

The fact that Edgeworth uses Lyttleton’s poem at this time—in a second, highly edited revision—indicates a split in Edgeworth’s public persona and discursive voice.

Although I do not think that her core beliefs—or even her message to women—change,

I do see her rhetorical, authorial voice becoming more complex in response to the public backlash centered on Wollstonecraft’s life and works. Prior to the turn of the century,

Edgeworth had openly espoused the precepts of equality, reason, and the cultivation of women’s minds. However, as she responded to shifting public attitudes toward women authors, Edgeworth had to become more subversive in her approach to these concepts and, as we see in her novels, in the treatment of the figure of Wollstonecraft herself.

Edgeworth’s radical beliefs prior to the turn of the century were not limited to women’s capacity for reason. Edgeworth, along with her father, formed part of a larger

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social circle of political radicals who were not only published by, but often gathered in the house of, Joseph Johnson to discuss their ideas. Her involvement in this circle also influenced the changes in her writing over the years following Wollstonecraft’s death.

This group included Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, William Blake,

Mary Hays, and Anna Barbauld. According to Barbara Taylor, this group found their conservative counterparts “markedly tolerant [within] a culture of ideas sufficiently confident and expansive to allow for lively disagreements of all kinds,” which allowed

Edgeworth and her peers to feel safe in their expression of more radical ideas (146).

However, when “this open-mindedness vanished under the triple pressures of developments in France, war, and … the spread of popular radicalism” in Britain, many authors felt the need to publicly revise the tone of their opinions (146). When Paine published his Rights of Man in 1792, he was “convicted for seditious libel in absentia”

(147). So, even before Wollstonecraft penned the second edition of Vindication of the

Rights of Woman in 1792, wherein she makes use of his Rights of Man as an underlying argument for extending these rights to women, the general public’s attitude toward political reformers—and Wollstonecraft herself—was already becoming less tolerant. Considering Edgeworth’s involvement in this circle, and what we have now established as her radical ideologies prior to the turn of the century, it seems that the years of political turmoil did influence her attitudes toward public censure.

As a result, I believe the changes in Edgeworth’s approach to the conventions of the novel have more to do with the shifts in public attitude than they do with her conservatism. As many of her sister novelists did after the events of the 1790s,

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Edgeworth had to work with even greater dexterity as the potential pitfalls for her as a woman writer increased.

Edgeworth’s second novel Belinda (1801) bears the most overt marks of

Wollstonecraft’s influence. In it, she shifts from the genre of her first, historical novel

(Castle Rackrent, 1800) to the exemplary or courtship novel, thereby uniting in it many of the tasks she attempted to achieve in her essays and conduct books. Critics have applied a variety of interpretations to Edgeworth’s choice to include a parody of Mary

Wollstonecraft, appropriately named Harriet Freke, whose language and actions mimic the public’s grotesque exaggerations of Wollstonecraft’s life and the contents of Rights of Woman. Some consider her choice to mock Wollstonecraft a sign of her essential conservatism, even though they understand that her presence in the text represents an engagement with revolutionary ideas, albeit an ambivalent one. For instance, Anne

Mellor argues that Edgeworth’s extreme caricature of Harriete Freke as “what we would call today a macho woman or butch lesbian … only reveals … her powerful fear that she would be painted with the Wollstonecraft brush” (155). Nonetheless, Mellor considers the character of Belinda Edgeworth’s “own version of the revolutionary feminist … the embodiment of all that Wollstonecraft called for in women: sound sense, wide reading, prudence, personal modesty, and a loving heart” (155). Similarly, Audrey Bilger argues that Belinda’s interactions with Freke are partially responsible for her character development, since their conversation leads her to question the “conventions of female behavior” and her subsequent consciousness of the use of reason—rather than convention—in her choices (99-100). Nonetheless, Bilger sees Edgeworth as

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ambivalent toward Wollstonecraftian “radical” feminism, instead “reveal[ing] a degree of conservatism” because of her presentation as a “female grotesque” figure (207).

However, Barbara Taylor categorizes Edgeworth as one of the novelists who, although they present “ostensibly anti-Wollstonecraftian intent, featuring feminist characters with battle-axe manners and extremist views” actually convey a “message

…[that] was more ambiguous than appeared on the surface, since their storylines implicitly promoted many of Wollstonecraft’s ideas” (248). Taylor credits a fear of a

“tarnished” reputation as Edgeworth’s “motive” for presenting such a mixed picture

(248).

Deborah Weiss provides the most thorough analysis of Edgeworth’s engagement with Wollstonecraft in her novels, though she does not address her other works. Weiss argues that in Belinda Edgeworth “deconstructs and then reconstructs her readers’ understanding of gender” by “splitting” the ideas of Wollstonecraft between two characters – Harriet Freke and Belinda (444). By creating a superficial caricature of

Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth “distances [Freke] from both Wollstonecraft and any idea that a strong faculty of understanding could be a masculine characteristic. Freke may remind readers of Wollstonecraft, but the intellectual distance between the two is enormous”

(445). I find this explanation most satisfactory, though I would add Lady Delacour to the equation since I believe Edgeworth’s exploration of women’s nature is even more complex than Weiss allows. Such a split helps explain Edgeworth’s change in tone, and demonstrates the methods she used to achieve her goals. If we consider the intense obsession Edgeworth seems to have throughout the novel with spectacle, outward

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appearances, and the public’s reaction to events, her choice to project various concepts onto characters makes sense.

What Edgeworth learned from Wollstonecraft’s death and afterlife is the power of public perception and the role that the printed word could play in it. In a novel that attempts to take on both the public idea of Wollstonecraft and her ideas, Harriet Freke is the embodiment of the “masculine woman” Wollstonecraft mentioned in Rights of

Woman, who terrified men with “their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming” (11).

Wollstonecraft meant such a picture as hyperbole, little imagining that such figures would loom larger than life in the public imagination at the turn of the century. In

Belinda, Edgeworth takes Wollstonecraft’s accompanying “manly virtues”—those which are “more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind”—and applies them to the characters of Lady Delacour and Belinda (11). It seems that in order for her to have the conversation she wishes to have with her woman readers, she must first exorcise the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft from her text.

One scene in Belinda stands out in light of the relationship between ideas, one’s public image, and the mentality of the public at large. Part of Lady Delacour’s critical back story involves an incident wherein Harriet Freke persuades her to engage in a duel. The sight of two women fighting a duel draws a crowd, making a spectacle of the event. Certainly, the duelists behaved rashly for entering into such a silly confrontation, but the reactions of the public are no less absurd or incorrect. “An English mob is really a formidable thing,” Lady Delacour observes, “[and] the untutored sense of propriety

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amongst these rustics was so shocked at the idea of a duel fought by women in men's clothes … I am convinced that they would not have been half so much scandalized if we had boxed in petticoats” (58). The essential characteristics of men and women in this scene are dismantled. Previously unacceptable “masculine” behavior would have been more acceptable if the female body had been “properly” attired, rendering gender a slippery game of shifting and insubstantial outward signs. As in so many other places in the novel, truth and appearance are blurred.

Although the contestants avoid the confrontation, when they follow the convention of firing the pistols into the air Lady Delacour’s pistol backfires and she is wounded. This wound, though artificial, becomes the centerpiece of her false belief that she is dying throughout the novel. Her attempts to hide the wound prevent her from caring for it properly; therefore, what began as a superficial wound becomes a life- threatening infection. At the end of the novel, this illness brings about Lady Delacour’s highly questionable domestication. Therefore, false constructions of gender create a false wound that is “transformed” into a real one that, in turn, plays its own part in the appropriation of her body by masculine systems. In the original scene, and at the end of the novel, threats of physical harm press close to Lady Delacour. The mob threatens to kill her and Harriet, and then she nearly dies from the infected wound. Ultimately, Lady

Delacour cannot escape the public eye or her socially constructed female body.

As she relays this tale, Lady Delacour pauses to point again to the unusual nature of women’s lives and therefore the need for a different type of women’s novel—

“'Life is a tragicomedy! Though the critics will allow of no such thing in their books, it is a true representation of what passes in the world’” (57). In spite of other critical omissions

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of her in their work, I view Lady Delacour as Edgeworth’s vehicle for duality, whereby she can jar the perfect symmetry of Belinda and upend the social expectations of both women and narrative.

In Belinda (1801), Edgeworth takes a cue from Burney’s Evelina by allowing her prefatory materials to interact with the novel itself in a way that presents internal contradictions. Edgeworth’s narrative voice can be interpreted on two levels, depending entirely upon the way the audience views the role of women in society. Either readers can take Edgeworth’s words at face value, or they can consider the way the various women in the novel challenge, contradict, and overturn the terms and ideas set forth in the “Preface.” By utilizing multiple openings, Edgeworth speaks with a blend of earnest supplication and authorial assurance, showing deference to the reading public and catering to society’s expectations for proper women writers, while reserving a degree of power for herself.

Edgeworth further complicates genre expectations with her unique, almost staged, ending scene, aimed directly at her readers. She couples this scene thematically with the content of the “Preface.” Recalling both Rennhak’s and Genette’s studies of paratexts, one might consider the nature of endings as similar framing devices. Since both theorists include all prefatory materials, along with Codas and

Epilogues, to fall within their definition of the paratexts, I argue that when defined as a porous “vestibule” through which a reader must pass, it is worthwhile to consider the ways endings mirror, mimic, or correspond to words and ideas brought up in the opening spaces of the text.

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Edgeworth begins the “Preface” with one of the most hotly contested concepts circulating in the long eighteenth century—the classification of general works of fiction.

She links this issue, however, to an implicit question about the role of the authorship and authority: “Every author has a right to give what appellation he may think proper to his works. The public have also a right to accept or refuse the classification that is presented” (3). The first sentence codifies “author” as a male profession by assigning it a masculine pronoun, and, perhaps not coincidentally, connecting it to the author’s act of selecting a genre for “his works” (3). Yet, in the next sentence, Edgeworth swiftly retracts this traditional, masculine authorial power and diverts it into the hands of her readers, “the public,” who can “accept or refuse” the author’s choices. In an uncanny semblance of Burney’s prefatory materials to Evelina, Edgeworth posits that where author-ity is in question, the public will name the victor.

Now that she has established the faceless—and genderless—public as the true authority for success or failure, Edgeworth makes another quick turn to address “the public” on behalf of her text (3). To place Belinda within the current genre debate,

Edgeworth claims that it “is offered to the public as a Moral Tale—the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel,” because she is all too aware of how “much folly, errour, and vice are disseminated in books classed under this denomination” (3). This approach is a fairly common convention among women writers of the period. As we have seen with

Burney, many women writers felt the need to distinguish their works from novels as a result of the novel’s reputation for moral laxity or corruption. Like her sister authors,

Edgeworth appeals to the sympathetic understanding of her audience, asking that her

“wish to assume another title will be attributed to feelings that are laudable, and not

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fastidious” (3). To aid in this self-portrayal, she identifies herself as a reader of novels, placing herself amidst her own readers as a confidant, while attempting to distinguish the good from the bad in the field of letters. As Burney did before and Austen does after her, Edgeworth places herself by allusion near several laudable women writers whose works can be called novels: “Were all novels like those of madame de Crousaz, Mrs

Inchbald, miss [sic] Burney, or Dr. Moore, she would adopt the name of novel with delight” (3).55 In this statement Edgeworth noticeably changes gender pronouns, referring to herself as a “she” in the same breath that she lists three out of four of the best authors of novels as women. Like Austen’s, Edgeworth’s brief discussion of gender and genre manages to connect her novel and herself to the community of women writers she most obviously admires, and invites her readers to join her in the project of undermining the predominately masculine authority on what counts as literature. Her appeal to the readers to join her in calling the novel a “Moral Tale”—since it can only be such if they agree to it—invites participation in the writing process. By inviting her readers into this project, she establishes a rapport with those who can help her achieve this goal.

In fact, Edgeworth’s multi-vocal approach is most evident in her ambiguous use of the seemingly static cultural term “moral,” for she claims to have written a capital ‘M’

“Moral Tale.” Therefore, any reader who wishes to place her text within throwing distance of a novel may rest assured that a “moral” can be found, and that both its characters and its contents are morally sound. The author herself claims to be

55 At the time of publication, Edgeworth would have had access to Burney’s first three novels: Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla. The Wanderer (1814) had yet to be published when she wrote this “Preface.”

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motivated by the desire to keep wayward young ladies from any degradation of their morals. However, if we examine the entry and exit points of the novel, the ‘vestibules’ through which readers must pass, Edgeworth has created an alternative narrative that operates to unravel the overt “moral.” Surprisingly, it does so by playing with the term itself. The prefatory materials combined with the novel’s end ask the reader rather pointedly to examine just what this “Moral Tale” is meant to teach.

Returning to the poem she first made use of in Letters for Literary Ladies,

Edgeworth places a four-line Epigram from Lord Lyttelton’s “Monody on his Wife” at the outermost layer of the novel. Although Edgeworth’s choice highlights one of many praiseworthy virtues to be found in a wife, these lines, taken out of context, do not represent the primary theme of the poem, which tends rather to emblematize the

English wife at the center of the domestic paradise of an English home. The lines are as follows:

A Prudence undeceiving, undeceiv'd, That nor too little, nor too much believ'd, That scorn'd unjust Suspicion's coward Fear And without Weakness knew to be sincere. (176-179)

Upon opening the text, a reader’s first impression might easily be that within the poem lies the “Moral” of Belinda. The reader might assume that the story will highlight the virtues of an angelic wife, with an emphasis on prudence, honesty, and sound judgment.56

56 However, Lyttleton’s “Monody” actually falls within the tradition of the English “house-poem” or “pastoral” elegies that were well-received by the public (Spencer and the Tradition). Although its subject is Lord Lyttleton’s wife, the first third of the poem grants its speaker’s dead wife and his estate equal importance. Within the first stanza the speaker’s “Tears their flowing Stream to dry” find an outlet “Beneath the Gloom of this embow'ring Shade/ This lone Retreat, for tender Sorrow made” (4, 4-6). Seven of the nineteen stanzas are dedicated exclusively to pastoral scenery; four utilize Romantic traditions of mythology to set Lady Lyttleton up as a sort of demigod incapable of human flaws. The pastoral and mythological blend together in a somewhat hackneyed version of a romantic tradition that

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Edgeworth’s selection of Lord Lyttleton’s “Monody” serves two distinct purposes.

First, she provides the required “moral” of the story that aligns it with the expectations of

“proper” women’s novels that glorify domesticity and virtue. Second, she subverts this moral by establishing the questions that will haunt the untidy ending. Read in context, this section of the “Monody” follows the trends of the sections before and after it. The stanza amounts to a list of Lady Lyttleton’s virtues, beginning by telling the reader that the deceased wife was “Nor only Good, and Kind,/ But Strong and Eleveated [sic] in

Mind” (159-160). Before he gets to Prudence, he adds “spirit,” “duty,” “dignity,” and “wit”

(60, 65, 68, 70). However, by singling this sentence out and using it as a framing device, Edgeworth encourages us to look at the wives and ladies in the story with a specific set of qualities in mind, the highest of which is prudence. By nature of contrast, this panegyric on Lady Lyttleton forces us to pay attention to her opposite in Belinda—

Lady Delacour. The character of Lady Delacour is the image of an un-domestic, un- maternal, morally corrupt, anti- Lady Lyttleton.

To emphasize this fact, Edgeworth bookends the “Monody” with the final scene of the novel, which Lady Delacour dominates. In a novel titled Belinda, a secondary character, whose overbearing presence has overrun the primary plot all along, steals the scene, deconstructing the courtship plot by exposing some of its conventions. “And now, my good friends,” she says in the midst of a scene meant to draw a tidy conclusion to the fates of the various characters, “shall I finish the novel for you?” (477). Assuming

paints a picture of Lord Lyttleton’s perfect life and perfect wife. Lyttleton dedicates two stanzas to Lady Lyttleton’s services as a mother, blended them together with her virtues. While Lord Lyttleton’s grief seems sincere, the blending of his love for domestic bliss in his pastoral estate and its Elysian, romantic overtones give the reader a sense that his wife was in some ways a part of the scenery, her identity being more invention than reality. With this great Lady gone, the pastoral picture loses its perfect composition.

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the posture of a stage narrator, Lady Delacour circles the room, narrating a “staged” ending for each character. As an afterthought, she adds, “Now I think of it, let me place you all in proper attitudes for stage effect. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so? … There! quite pretty and natural!” (478). Her clever tableaus mock the one- dimensional figures and stock ending of the courtship novel.

In her original sketch of the novel, Edgeworth planned for Lady Delacour to die at the end, which would have been the conventional and socially acceptable penance for her wayward lifestyle (Belinda 482). Closer to the middle of the novel, when Lady

Delacour faces her trial of death, undergoes a surgery to remove the infected area surrounding the wound from her duel, she survives and becomes reconciled with her husband. According to the language of the novel, her “reformation” is complete.

Edgeworth gives the last word in this scene to Lady Delacour, which is spoken to a husband happy to receive her since he has admitted to his own faults in their breach:

‘Observe, my lord,' continued she, smiling, 'I said won, not tamed! – A tame Lady Delacour would be a sorry animal, not worth looking at. Were she even to become domesticated, she would fare the worse. … if Lady Delacour were to wash off her rouge, and lay aside her air, and be as gentle, good, and kind as Belinda Portman, for instance, her lord would certainly say to her, "So alter'd are your face and mind, 'Twere perjury to love you now."’ (314)

Rather than transforming into the perfect death-angel like Lady Lyttleton, Lady Delacour stubbornly rises from her brush with death with a smirk. At the crucial point of her so- called reformation and domestication, Lady Delacour makes clear the parameters of her domestic partnership—to admit she has been “won” implies consent rather than the coercion or dominance of one “tamed.” At her most vulnerable, and circled by characters, including the proper “Heroine” of the piece, she insists upon refusing the

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standard definition of reformation, though she allows the term. This shift of definition, placed as it is, alters the context of her ending statements.

Instead, the “reformed” Lady Delacour, who has purportedly learned to value domesticity, takes over the narrative in a way that undermines both the genre and the stated moral. She gives lip service to the domestic perfections of a Lady Lyttleton, but rejects the idea of a couple living “happily all the rest of their days” by dryly commenting that her—and by extension the novel’s—audience is “not in much danger of hearing such an account of modern marriages” (477). Lady Delacour’s frank declarations about motives and the realities of marriage destabilize the very notions of femininity that Lord

Lyttleton’s perfect marriage requires. If the audience compares this scene with Lord

Lyttleton’s “Monody,” such an ending mocks the virtuous “Lady” who left behind “Sweet

Babes, who, like the little playful Fawns,/Were wont to trip along these verdant Lawns/

By your delighted Mother's Side” (67-69). Lady Delacour shows little promise as one

“whose tender Care/ To ev'ry Virtue would have form'd [her children’s] Youth,/ And strew'd with Flow'rs the thorny Ways of Truth?” (71-73). If anything, her words question the very virtues Lady Lyttleton represents. After all, for all the attempts made at domesticating Lady Delacour, she shows that in the end, she can resist true domestication and write her own story.

In the final moments, after settling the fates of the rest of the characters, Lady

Delacour proceeds to write her own ending, including the required “moral,” with a staged wink and nod to the audience:

Now, lady Delacour, to show that she is reformed, comes forward to address the audience with a moral—a moral!—yes, ‘Our tale contains a moral, and no doubt, You all have wit enough to find it out.’ (478)

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This speech is the final word of the novel, with the last two lines turned into a rhymed couplet, further highlighting it as a framing device. Lady Delacour’s internal allusions— her references to the Preface, and arguably the Epigraph – open the door for multiple readings of the primary characters in the novel, along with the concept of the “moral” of the text. This statement, highlighted as it is, seems to dare the reader to question

Edgeworth’s proclamation that Belinda should be read as a “Moral Tale,” regardless of the difference of context and rhetorical tone. Perhaps if Belinda had been the one speaking of morals, this speech could be taken differently. However, when we consider that the challenge is set forth by Lady Delacour, its refusal to tell the audience the moral invokes the Preface’s other suggestion that Edgeworth grants her reader the power to decide whether a work can be even be called a moral tale. Weiss argues that “[w]hen

Lady Delacour teases her readers to find the ‘moral,’ she is, characteristically, laughing at the kind of world view that allows determinations of human virtue to be summed up in a maxim,” but rather as something that “will emerge through the kind of careful analysis, use of good judgment, and intelligent consideration that Belinda has developed and demonstrated over three volumes and thirty-one chapters” (461). Both meaning and

“moral” can be shared with readers, who can “themselves …become female philosophers” (Weiss 461). Weiss assumes, however, that Belinda’s conclusions and morality take precedence and represent Edgeworth’s intended conclusions. I mean to take this several steps beyond and to give Edgeworth credit for multiple contradictory interpretations. I consider the text as an open invitation to her readers draw subversive conclusions. Edgeworth makes a claim for all women—one that includes implicitly her women readers—that agency can be claimed as part of a process of development by

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women in possession of their own reason. By challenging and revising the forms of the novel, Edgeworth suggests that readers can inhabit multiple subject positions in order to derive both implied and stated meanings from her text.

By inviting them to consider alternative interpretations, Edgeworth grants her readers a great deal of trust. Through the opening and closing of Belinda, Edgeworth incorporates all three of Renhak’s voices: in the epigram, she calls on an external

“allographic” voice, in her Preface, she employs an “authorial” voice, and in the conclusion of the novel, she allows a character, or “actorial” voice, to step out of the narrative to speak to the topics she raised in the opening passages. Both epigram and

Preface play on the convention of the “proper” novel, which must have a sound Moral conclusion. When considered as a framing device—and therefore read together with the last scene of the novel—Edgeworth asks the reader to decide whether the poem in the epigram represents true feminine virtue or a mockery of it. Likewise, the language of the

Preface emphasizes the reader’s choice in both the beginning and the end to decide whether the words of the moralistic Belinda or those of the worldly Lady Delacour represent the message of the story.

This loosening of boundaries shows readers—and women readers in particular— a method and mode of self-authorship. By creating a bond through language with her readers, Edgeworth finds a way to empower them. She demonstrates the fluidity of language, and reveals to readers the presence of a broader community of women in her allusions to her sister authors who were making the same subversive moves with their own texts.

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Burney’s Wanderer and the Legacy of the Long Eighteenth Century Women’s Novel

As we recall, one of the authors Edgeworth listed as an exemplary novel writer in her preface was Frances Burney. Edgeworth’s citation of Burney recalls a time when women authors were still considered morally sound; her use of Burney aligned her with an earlier tradition of female authority that gave some women writers a higher degree of respect than they held after the Wollstonecraft scandal. Since Burney was universally revered in the press, Edgeworth wished to capitalize on her reputation by associating herself with both her fame and her talent. Perhaps she also saw in Burney the same thing Austen recognized—a woman who spoke for women in a time when the social limitations resembled her own. Yet by the end of her life, Burney had witnessed the social changes of the end of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth century. She witnessed the opening of Edgeworth’s career and Austen’s first two novels, for her last novel was not published until 1814. Therefore, she too must have seen and been influenced by the advances and alterations that her earlier novels inspired.

Although her long life accounts for the fact that she is the first published author of this particular grouping, her influence also reaches into the nineteenth century with two of the later authors—Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. Fate is responsible for the length of their lives; however, the breadth of publication dates can tell us something about the changes wrought from the later decades of the eighteenth century into the early part of the nineteenth century. Burney’s publications range from 1778 – 1814;

Edgeworth’s range from 1795 – 1834; Austen’s range from 1811 – 1818. We can see in

Burney’s final work the culmination of her own career, along with the interplay of the

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ideas of the women whose careers played out over their lives. Although Cecilia and

Camilla were Burney’s most quoted novels, her last published novel was The Wanderer, which came out 36 years after Evelina. Perhaps this lapse of years explains the marked difference in the prefatory materials to The Wanderer from her earlier texts.

In the lengthy dedication of The Wanderer “To Doctor Burney,” a mature, married

“F.B. D’Arblay” addresses the same paternal figure to whom she first spoke in Evelina.

At the end of her career, Burney seems to have come full circle as she formally acknowledges her authorship of Evelina and names her father as the object of the dedicatory poem therein: “The earliest pride of my heart,” she admits, “was to inscribe to my much-loved Father the first public effort of my pen” (3). In spite of this warm beginning, the majority of this dedication focuses on Burney’s accomplishments as an author, and her choice to take on political subjects in her text.

Though she “cast[s], now, at the same revered feet where I prostrated that first essay this, my latest attempt,” the beginning of the dedication actually underscores her independence from him and her development as an artist (3). Unlike Evelina, Burney dedicates the book as much to herself as she does to her father. Her well-earned pride comes out when she refers to the accomplishment of a “literary career” and the approbation of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke, who supported the play that her father condemned (4, 5). To contradict her humble praise of his name, she notes that these notable literary men “each, separately, though at the same time, condescended to stand forth the champion of my first small work; ere ever I had had the happiness of being presented to either; and ere they knew that I bore, my Father! your honoured name” (5).

In fact, the author of The Wanderer no longer bears her father’s name. Instead of the

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shy “Fanny,” she has become the cultured Madame D’Arblay, valued for her company and her literary accomplishments. The daughter’s need for acceptance can be heard at times, yet Burney’s mature authorial voice remains the driving force of this preface.

Burney might have had additional reasons for addressing this introduction to her father. While she certainly respected her father and wished to honor him by placing his name at the front of her book, her choice to claim her father as dedicatee of this introduction seems in some ways to be a veiled strategy to position herself in a role that allows her to discuss politics to a much broader audience. At a time when it was still deemed inappropriate for women to engage in political debate, Burney positions herself rhetorically in traditionally non-threatening roles, paying careful attention to the needs and desires of her readers. From this position, she can safely challenge the patriarchy that her father’s authority has long represented in her life. Her father stands as an emblem for the broader system of the literary establishment in much the same way that the “Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews” did in the opening of Evelina. The difference here is that her name is known. Her confidence in her readers, however, remains unshaken.

Burney begins, therefore, with an appeal to her readers’ humanity. She portrays herself as a devoted daughter and a grieving sister, one whose family has been

“depriv[ed] …of the darling of [their] hearts” in 1800 during the early phases of the composition of The Wanderer (4).57 She revisits her youthful concerns that her father

57 Burney’s sister Susanna suffered through a difficult marriage to a man who abused her emotionally and, more than likely, physically. He was unfaithful to her and forced her against her will to remain married to him when she and her family asked him to allow her to return to live with them. Near the end of her life, her husband refused to bring her home in spite of her illness. Burney deeply regretted her failure to see her sister before her death, which occurred not long before she wrote this Preface. Margaret Anne

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would want her to “shun the public eye” in order to glory in his ultimate acceptance, and she relishes the fact that “[h]e, whom I dreaded to see blush at my production, should be the first to tell me not to blush at it myself!”58 (3). This combined image—a blushing, modest daughter who receives praise for her work under duress, alongside a grieving sister—sets the stage for the much longer portion of the dedication, which focuses on women novelists entering into the public sphere of political debates.

She enters this discussion by personifying the text of The Wanderer, telling the story of how it had “already twice traversed the ocean in manuscript” form with her and

“was suffered to pass, without demur, comment, or the smallest examination” almost like a stow-away (4). Just as she consistently gives physical form and reality to her novels Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla when she describes their movements and interactions with the world,59 so she implies that the customs officers and readers of both France and England “into whose hands its narrative may chance to fall” are

“friend[s] to humanity” because they have been “generous” and “trusting” in their handling of its pages (4). By doing so, Burney encourages her readers to imitate her intimate relationship with the characters of her novel by taking them into their own homes as surrogate friends. If book and character become one, the barriers between author and reader lessen, spurring a more intimate discursive experience. The

Doody’s biography contains a full account of this portion of Burney’s life in her chapter “The Late Comic Plays.”

58 By 1814, her protestations and insistence on anonymity might have seemed a bit overdone, particularly for such a well-established author.

59 She and her sister Susanna “wept, with tender partiality, over the imaginary ashes of Caroline Evelyn, the mother of Evelina” (8). Rather than referring to the composition of Evelina as writing, she refers to the character Evelina as a person, and says that “in defiance of every self-effort, Evelina struggled herself into life” (“Preface” 8).

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wandering protagonist, who began her life as a wandering manuscript, seems to seek shelter in the arms of the waiting reader.

Burney’s Heroine happens also to be a political refugee, which gives her author another cause for concern that both character and author might be rejected by their readers since she had married a French émigré and was known to have spent a number of years in France since the publication of Camilla. Burney tackles this potential barrier on two fronts—by connecting politics to personal relationships and by weighing in on the role of the novel. Burney claims to have “no disposition … for venturing upon the stormy sea of politics,” and tells her readers that they “must turn elsewhere their disappointed eyes” if they want to find “materials for political controversy; or fresh food for national animosity” (4). Instead, she attempts to place The Wanderer in the same category as her previous novels as “a composition upon general life, manners, and characters” (4). At first she claims to do so “without any species of personality, either in the form of foreign influence, or of national partiality” (4). She takes this opportunity to capitalize upon the firmer ground she has gained as an author to frame her argument within the purview of the novel. Yet she makes use of the stylistic expectations of the novel to justify the inclusion of political materials. She argues that the realism to which all authors aspire requires them “to delineate, in whatever form, any picture of actual human life,” which, she explains, “without reference to the French Revolution, would be as little possible, as to give an idea of the English government, without reference to our own” (6). Throughout the introduction, she compares her native land and people to the

French, and twice she uses the term “friend of humanity” to reference the kind of sympathetic acceptance that transcends nations and politics, “whose waves, for ever

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either receding or encroaching, with difficulty can be stemmed, and never can be trusted” (6, 4). This type of relational approach bears a marked resemblance to that of

Smith’s in Desmond.

In fact, the resemblance to Smith extends further since Burney explains it as a change in her own perspective—a personal development—which mirrors the way that the characters in their respective novels experience change and growth. By delineating the interactions in a woman’s life of ideas, opinions, and personal relationships, both women reflect the core values of women’s novels.60 In their prefatory materials, both women argue that personal relationships constitute the foundation for the rights of women to take an interest in political matters. For Smith, it only made sense for women to have “business with politics,” since they had ““fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged … in the scenes that are acting around them” (iii). Burney is more conservative, however, and explains that her “business with politics” marks a natural shift in her circumstances; she does not extend her claim into the more radical suggestion that it is an inherent right. Nonetheless, she does consider the way personal experience connects with the abstract principles of humanity. Before her marriage, she says, “every tie, whether public or mental, was single; and every wish had one direction;

I held political topics to be without my sphere, or beyond my skill” (5). After her marriage, she explains the presence of international politics in her works as a natural extension of her home life, and the relationships it afforded her, because she is “united, alike by choice and by duty, to a member of a foreign nation” (5). She wants her

60 The time frame of publication and question of interaction between these two authors makes it difficult to say whether Burney agrees with Smith here, or merely echoes her on a subconscious level.

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readers to understand that her sense of the world has changed because her relationships have expanded, and she wishes to share the lesson she’s learned from these interactions—that “individual bosom feelings; which, where strongly impelled by

[sic] dependant happiness, insidiously, unconsciously direct our views, colour our ideas, and entangle our partiality in our interests” (5). In spite of these natural “partialities,” she hopes that a deeper sense of humanity will transcends nationalism, exclaiming at one point that “[e]very friend of humanity, of what soil or what persuasion soever he may be, must rejoice” when peace replaces animosity between countries (6). As a precursor to a novel, Burney’s method of re-contextualizing the political within the personal functions as self-legitimization. She does not ask permission to speak of politics, she only explains her reasons for doing what is already done and heading into the world.

Burney also makes use of the dedication to The Wanderer to address current debates about the parameters of the novel and the appropriateness of its containing

“the very serious subject treated upon, from time to time, in this work,” facing head on the accusations that patriarchal literary authorities have been asking: “Is a Novel the vehicle for such considerations? such discussions?” (6). Although she defends her political content with this statement, she also makes a broader argument for the legitimacy of the novel. Her answer focuses on the goals that good novels share, of

“illustrating the characters, manners, or opinions of the day… [of] exhibit[ing] what is noxious or reprehensible, [and what] should scrupulously be accompanied by what is salubrious, or chastening” (6). It seems that even in 1814, Burney was still debating the proper content for the novel, as well as the relative influence it had over the actions of its readers. Like Wollstonecraft, she considers the novel a form that can be used for

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good or ill, depending upon circumstances: “And is not a Novel, permit me, also, to ask, in common with every other literary work, entitled to receive its stamp as useful, mischievous, or nugatory, from its execution?” (7). The difference in this case, exists in each author’s relative faith in the reader, for Wollstonecraft believes that readers need, at least initially, a co-reader to guide them in the learning process. Burney’s standard lies in the “execution” of style and form. Additionally, Burney’s formula has the effect of creating a genderless standard for the quality of a novel; a novel judged upon its

“execution” cannot be judged by the gender of its author. Perhaps, by this point, Burney feels confident enough in the changes the novel has undergone to believe that the standards for novels have expanded enough to be visible, and that more novels of this denomination exist.

In fact, rather than concerning herself with the ability of the novel to assist readers with moral instruction, Burney chose to use her preface to promote solidarity among novelists and raise the status of the novel. Her dismissal of the continued trend of undermining novels as a lesser genre parallels Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ in

Northanger Abbey, which was published after The Wanderer. Here is Burney:

Divest, for a moment, the title of Novel from its stationary standard of insignificance, and say! What is the species of writing that offers fairer opportunities for conveying useful precepts? It is, or it ought to be, a picture of supposed, but natural and probable human existence. It holds, therefore, in its hands our best affections; it exercises our imaginations; it points out the path of honour. (7)

As Austen did sometime in this interim of years,61 Burney homes in on the novel’s unique ability to “convey” certain messages to its readers through a style that insists

61 As discussed in previous chapters, the exact dates of Austen’s composition and revision of the ‘Defense of the Novel’ in Northanger Abbey are much disputed. It might have been written as early as her initial composition in 1798-1799, or during her final revisions of 1816. Some portion of the ‘Defense’ must

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upon “natural and probable human existence” rather than the rather rigid standards of the masculine traditional of conduct writing. The common theme of realism tended to be linked with the novel’s ability to create a sympathetic connection with its readers, its ability “to hold in its hands our best affections,” and the “path of honour” found as a result. Certainly these novelists took advantage of the safety of the established mode of moral instruction as they expanded the novel to fit their needs. However, the novelists who influenced the genre concerned themselves with the relationship between the reader and believable characters.

To demonstrate this point, she gives her preface what she calls “a living interest” by sharing her own youthful feelings of shame at wanting to be a writer. She tells that, as a young woman writing Evelina in secret, she was so “impressed … with ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition, that at the age of adolescence, I struggled against the propensity which, even in childhood, even from the moment I could hold a pen, had impelled me into its toils” (8). Only as a successful writer—and reader—of the women’s novel can she reflect on the genre with confidence. The connection of being a reader and a writer cannot be underestimated, for Burney, along with the women writers whose lives and fiction crossed paths with hers, understood the relational aspect of being a writer and being a member of a community of readers. She attributes her “power of interesting the affections” to the fact that she is “still awake to them herself” (9). Meanwhile, she explains the somewhat intangible transfer of feeling from author to reader as “affections” that move “through the many much loved agents of

have been revised after 1801, however, because Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, which is mentioned in it, was published that year.

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sensibility,” which gives a more concrete reading of Hume’s abstract theories of the creation of sympathy among people (9). These “agents” Burney places again in the metaphorical role of personal relationships, which gives her fiction a sense of immediacy; the “agents of sensibility [are] … conjugal, maternal, fraternal, friendly, and

… filial” (9). In spite of the initial address to her father, her sincerest words are for her readers, who enter into her “family” by way of the Preface and become participants in this sympathetic exchange, and the community that blossoms as a result of it.

Burney further recognizes and codifies the format of women’s novels, perhaps identifying at this early date the importance of the era that we now consider the “long eighteenth century” because she understood it in terms of the development of women’s novels. In spite of the fact that novels continued to be held as the “lowest in literary estimation,” Burney insists that

'Tis the grandeur, yet singleness of the plan; the never broken, yet never obvious adherence to its execution; the delineation and support of character; the invention of incident; the contrast of situation; the grace of diction, and the beauty of imagery; joined to a judicious choice of combinations, and a living interest in every partial detail, that give to that sovereign species of the works of fiction, its glorious pre-eminence. (7)

Authors make novels superior by first making the “execution” of the form invisible—or

“never obvious” in the midst of discussions of both gender and national politics. They focus on character, incident, and by making “judicious” choices, give “living interest” to the narrative in a way that engages their audience. In this sample, we hear Smith,

Edgeworth, and Wollstonecraft’s efforts to realign the novel around character and natural events. We also see Austen’s template for—or evidence of her unconscious accordance with—the idea that novels are made inferior only by their association with its worst examples.

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Burney’s summary of the qualities of the “sovereign species of the works of fiction” in 1814 delineates the accumulated dialogue of women writers across approximately 45 years. Burney shares with Austen, Edgeworth, Smith, and

Wollstonecraft the belief that novels have the potential to equal other forms of literature in its execution of both style and content. Most importantly, she understood the power of the novel to circumvent structures of the male-dominated world and solidify the communication of ideas among women. Although her confidence may have been understandably shaken at some points in her career, her last novel shows that she believed women could hold a degree of power in their hands when they held a pen to paper.

291 CHAPTER 6 CODA

[A]nd if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.

—Jane Austen Northanger Abbey

As I discussed in Chapter 1, Austen’s ‘Defense’ represents one of her most direct statements on authorship and the novel.62 It also served as the seed from which this project grew. So I will end by returning to it, adding what I consider to be the most important aspect of understanding the fullness of its meaning—that I believe Austen made some key revisions to this section during or after her composition of Persuasion.

Various arguments have been made about the coincidence of the publication of

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together.63 Although I address these arguments, I do so in the service of understanding the way Austen revisited longstanding themes in her own work, as well as responded to and interacted with the ideas I’ve discussed in the writings of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Maria

Edgeworth.

Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion concern themselves with women as readers and writers and, more specifically, with the space they could carve out for women’s voices in the midst of a masculine literary tradition. In spite of the many years

62 A complete copy of Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ can be found in the Appendix.

63 These arguments attempt to answer the question of whether Austen meant for the novels to be read together or whether the decision to publish them together was made by her brother after her death and without her knowledge. No conclusive evidence exists to support any of these arguments as fact.

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between their dates of composition and the degree of development Austen must have undergone as an author, Austen thought it worthwhile to revisit Northanger Abbey at the end of her life. At the same time that she was working on the final drafts of Persuasion,

Austen also revised Northanger Abbey to prepare it for publication.

Critics vary in their estimations of the amount of changes Austen made to

Northanger Abbey at this time. Austen biographer Dierdre LeFaye gives a helpful sense of the time frame through which Austen worked on these novels. Based on comments in her journals and letters, critics generally agree that Austen composed Susan, the novel that would later become Northanger Abbey, between 1798 and 1799 (Grossman).64

Austen began writing Persuasion on 8 August 1815 (A Family Record xxviii). In the

Spring of 1816, after Henry Austen bought back the manuscript of Susan, Austen

“revise[d] and intend[ed] to offer [it] again for publication” (xxviii). LeFaye dates Austen’s completion of the first draft of Persuasion on 18 July 1816 and its final draft on 6 August

1816. The date of completion of Northanger Abbey has not been recorded, but her revisions of this long-dormant novel must have either coincided with, or have come fast upon the heels of, her final revisions of Persuasion.

Additionally, I see within the ‘Defense’ a change in tone that suggests both a young and an experienced author speaking in tandem. Austen begins by speaking as one newly entering upon the literary scene, declaring “I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding”

64 Austen dates her completion of Susan (the first draft of what became Northanger Abbey) in 1803—the year she sold it to Crosby and Son publishers—in her “Advertisement” to Northanger Abbey (1).

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(30). She follows this statement with one that continues logically, yet the speaker seems to have altered slightly—shifting from one who is a new author referring to “novel writers” as “they” to one who has already experienced criticism and seen her fellow women authors suffer at the hands of the critical presses. In particular, she shifts from the singular noun to the plural, referring to herself as part of a body of women novelists:

“Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body” (emphasis mine 30). As the passage builds, her tone grows more and more confident, making this bit of the novel stand out even more. We might interpret this break in the narrative as the youthful zeal of a writer whose later prose shows far more polish. Certainly Persuasion makes some of these points with far more grace. I think, however, that Austen allowed it to stand as it was in order to speak with fervor of what she felt so strongly.

More importantly however, Austen thought it necessary to speak directly to her readers about the delay in publication of this manuscript and the revisions she made to it in the only preface written for any of her published novels, titled “Advertisement by the

Authoress to Northanger Abbey.” As Burney, Edgeworth, and Smith did in their prefaces, Austen rather cannily dismisses the presence of the presses while reinforcing the direct connection of author to reader as she comments on the reason for the long delay of publication. Her book was sold to a “bookseller” who thought it “worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish” (1). However, she pushes this circumstance aside, telling her readers that “with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern” (1). Instead, Austen directs her readers’ attention to things that

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“during this period … have undergone considerable changes”—“places, manners, books, and opinions” (1). As with other books by women authors, these topics can be dismissed easily as frivolous women’s concerns. However, Austen singles out the very tools with which women authors worked to construct social commentary. Her mention of books points to her inclusion of a host of women authors throughout the text, connecting their presence with the broader world of ideas or “opinions” and “manners (1).” Austen evokes a sense of women’s progress and influence in the public sphere through these channels as they combine in the form of the novel.

In the ‘Defense,’ Austen addresses the dynamic of active readership in a rather open criticism of masculine texts like the Spectator. In doing so, she reveals an important argument that recurs throughout the ‘Defense’—the importance of speaking openly about novels, and the need for women to locate and utilize the power available to them through the common ground of the novel. Aside from the examples of the

“History of England … Milton, Pope, and Prior,” Austen wryly notes that, when asked what they are reading, young ladies may “proudly have produced the [Spectator], and told its name …[but] the chances must be against [their] being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication” (emphasis mine 31). Austen makes a great deal of this divide between outward compliance with masculine expectations of “young ladies” and their inner desires. She pits her own power as a writer against the influence of these masculine expectations on the behaviors of female readers and writers. The tipping point, she argues, lies in the inner lives of readers and the way this interiority connects with the power of the author. Power, she reveals to both reader and writer, lies at the nexus of a reader’s and writer’s voice—one will “name” proudly her desire to read the

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novel and one will write the names of her fellow authors in her own texts, thereby reinforcing the validity of the novel and its readers. Although they pretend to be so, readers of novels like Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda, which Austen names pointedly, are not “disgust[ed]” by “improbably circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living” while reading good women’s novels (31). Here Austen steps in with a stern voice—“I cannot approve of it”— reminding them that their feigned behavior does not reflect the true “extensive and unaffected pleasure” they have gained from women’s novels (emphasis mine 30). Her reminder of the pleasure women’s novels have brought—much more “than those of any other literary corporation in the world”—serves as another reality check to her readers

(30). Record sales of women’s novels suggest to a single reader that she is not alone in the joy she takes in her reading. Austen calls attention to the fact that they are one of many like Isabella and Catherine who “in defiance of wet and dirt …shut themselves up, to read novels together” (30). When they do, they will encounter novels with “matter

[and] manner” that is natural and relatable to their lives, along with characters and situations that reinforce the shared values echoed in the texts of other women authors who have the courage to display the “greatest powers” of their minds (31). They will find community.

In naming male authors, Austen also compares the novel to what young women had been told they should be reading—conduct books, sermons, and historical texts.

Through this comparison, she indicates indirectly the fresh changes women writers have brought to literature. Years before this, Burney indicated in her preface to Evelina that while the prominent male authors “may have cleared the weeds, they have also

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culled the flowers; and, though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren,” implying that she has something living and new to add (9). At the end of her life, Austen reminds readers that while “the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of

England” continued to rehash the literature of the past, which was made up of “topics of conversation which no longer concern[ed] anyone living,” women writers breathed fresh life onto the page (31). They did this by absorbing and reconfiguring the very texts that were putting young women (and young men) to sleep. Part of what makes Northanger

Abbey so much fun is the irreverent laughter the young people share with the readers at the expense of the boring literature of the day. Austen portrays contemporary male authors as old mouths speaking in a dying language that is malleable enough to be made irrelevant by the modern discourse of the living, lively literary ladies. Women authors, by maintaining a connection with other authors and their audience, made themselves relevant in the present.

Austen’s interest in the role of women’s authorship manifests itself in both

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. In a conversation between the heroine in

Northanger Abbey, her “true” female friend Eleanor, and the hero Henry Tilney, Austen develops what becomes a prominent theme throughout the novels—the omission of women’s voices on the page:

But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. … 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: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. (109, 110)

Though she couches it in Catherine’s silly comments about being disinterested in

“history,” Austen’s point cannot be lost. Women have been omitted from history, and

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those who write the narratives are subject to suspicion. She revisits the same idea in

Persuasion in another conversation between a man and woman: “Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. 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. I will not allow books to prove anything” (255). In both cases,

Austen challenges the singular and unquestioned authority of masculine texts while negotiating the new territory of women’s voices and narratives. She does so as a member of an expanding community of women, one she features in her novels both literally and metaphorically. In Northanger Abbey, they are women who owe to one another “protection and regard,” sister novelists who are abused by reviewers and cannot, as recipients of such abuse afford to “desert one another” because they are collectively “an injured body” (30). She again refers to the historical authority men have to fall back on—the abridgers and collectors of previously printed verses whose works seem to gain praise simply for reproducing what came before. Austen, however, dares to praise women’s work for its innovation.

Austen’s most important note is her call for solidarity. If men have the past upon which to rely, women have only one another. Since “there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them,” women’s only recourse must be to remind the public, themselves, and one another, that women’s novels represent “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen

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language” (31). They must remember that their works continue to be in high demand, as can be proven by their success with readers, whatever the pompous critics might say

(30). They must, in short, bind themselves together as a unit of protection against the historical, abusive voices and speak in positive language that expresses the regard they are due—to hear the silent approbation spoken by the readers who love and support their work, and reinforce one another’s work by creating bonds within the work itself.

Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ resonates with issues she raises in Persuasion because she was still concerned with them 13 years later, after writing and reading the reviews of her own novels, and reading the novels of reviews of her fellow women authors. Although Northanger Abbey’s plot, characters, and tone seem stilted compared to the sophistication and subtlety of Persuasion, Austen remains deeply invested in the role women authors play in society. In both books, she speaks of the relationships between men’s and women’s writing, of reading, of heroines, and of women’s voices.

As her career progressed, Austen’s authorial voice and presence moved into the background, becoming less obtrusive as her focus shifted from genre development to character development. The authorial voice that might be considered “in dialogue” with the reader moves deeper into the consciousness of the character of the protagonist.

The author of Northanger Abbey speaks directly to her readers about Catherine’s lack of understanding of the world around her and her failures as a “heroine.” At the same time, her joy in authorship shines through; she relishes the machinations of the novel and plays with conventions in order to create new ones. In fact, Austen begins her own authorial journey in Northanger Abbey by toying with the very notion of what it means to be a female protagonist—a “heroine” in the shifting conventions of the courtship novel.

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The author of Persuasion never intrudes overtly; she channels her only comments about authorship through the mouth of her protagonist in a carefully crafted scene that sets up the climax of the story. Her authorial journey ends in Persuasion with a heroine whose love story defies generic demands and whose romantic development happens in reverse. As this journey progresses, Austen’s relationship with her readers, which I argue is an important form of friendship, alters in its tone and timbre, but never in its overall goal for women. Throughout her life, Austen believed that women needed to develop agency as individuals and solidarity as a community. She refined these beliefs throughout her life, but her novels show a consistent desire for women to achieve this goal. Her novels show varying degrees of faith in women—and humanity as a whole—to make the choices necessary to achieve these ends.

As Northanger Abbey focuses so much on genre and the accomplishments of sister writers, the triangular relationship between women authors, sister authors, and their readers forces her characters into a slightly less realistic dimension. The laughter is at their expense, and Austen delights in toying with them, much as Emma later does with the lives of those around her. Persuasion is more about the way women can either write their own stories or allow them to be written for them. It is very much about who holds the pen. The novel opens with humorous and vivid detail as a book within a book that tells a story of titles attached to land, men, and fortunes, along with the spatial relocations of women who must be attached to both men and their fortunes.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; … and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed--this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened -- "ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL. (3)

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With this humorous image of a man with a book, Austen challenges masculine narratives and their authority. However, she does so from the interior world of a quiet, private woman whose life has been lived largely in retirement—a woman who others dismiss as easily as the masculine presses still dismissed most women writers. Austen focuses her story on Anne Elliot who, “with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way -- she was only Anne” (6). Echoing Northanger Abbey’s phrasing,

Anne Elliot is easily dismissed as “only Anne” to those around her in the same way that women’s novel can be cast aside as “only a novel” to those in the world around them.

In a critical scene near the end of Persuasion, the soft spoken, calm Anne Elliot says to a tearful, sentimental Captain Harville that since men have had the upper hand in education and reading, “the pen has been in their hands" (Persuasion 255). Many pens are at play in this seemingly simple scene. Anne, while roundly dismissing masculine representations of women on the page, speaks the words Austen has written on another page and, in doing so, points to the growing trend of women’s authorship.

Although she speaks first of the omissions of the past, the scene frames the realities of the present. 65 Austen orchestrates a delicate balance of words, movements, and silences in this scene that allow her to reveal—momentarily—the hands of a woman author at work. Although the access to education of which Anne speaks has yet to be

65 In “Reading and Writing in Persuasion,” John Pikoulis calls this scene “the finest example of reading and writing in Persuasion,” precisely because “[a]s Anne speaks, he [Wentworth] writes”; and though his writing “accidentally lend[s] weight to her notion that literature is in the hands of men” (33, 34). More to the point, he notes that the pen in Wentworth’s hand “is also in Jane Austen’s hand … who, in the act of writing, splinters into female (Anne/the narrator) and male (Wentworth), thus granting bifurcated expression to the psychosexual impulse of creation” (34).

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achieved, the seizing of the pen has begun. To underscore this point, across the room,

Wentworth drops his own pen. Much like Wentworth’s sister Mrs. Croft, whose gentle hand on the reigns of their horse redirects the course she and her husband take on the road, we later learn that Anne’s quiet words have redirected Wentworth’s pen, his breath, his very soul. But in this moment, the drop of his pen has the effect of breaking

Diderot’s fourth wall by pointing to Austen’s authorship. 66 I believe Austen spent her life’s work trying to accomplish what she does through this seamless sleight of hand. By allowing herself to be caught in the act of doing what Anne says women have not been allowed to do, Austen reaches into the scene to grasp the pen from the hand of the men of past ages.

“A Moral—Yes!”

It is tempting to leave off with Edgeworth’s coy statement at the end of Belinda, which must encapsulate the way that every woman in this study wove a clever double conversation into her tale and then bowed out gracefully with a pious speech and a knowing smile: “‘Our tale contains a moral, and no doubt,/ You all have wit enough to find it out’” (478). Nonetheless, Edgeworth’s ending represents method more than meaning. Instead, meaning must be found amid the shifting definition of women’s friendship and its contribution to the growth of women’s community in the novels themselves. Johnson’s awkward, contradictory definition of a friend as “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy” yet simultaneously “opposed to foe or enemy” finds its way into Austen’s expression of the great sisterhood of writers who

66 Usually when Austen makes an appearance as “author,” she calls more attention to the fact and does so with a touch of humor. My claim in this instance depends on her heavy emphasis on symbolism. In other novels, her narrative voice tends to make its appearance near the beginning or conclusion of the story.

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faced contemptuous critics and a hostile press (1:836). But Austen, along with those mother and sister novelists discussed herein, demanded more; women should support and defend one another as they collectively gained the courage to speak aloud what they had only suggested silently thus far—their names, their relevance, and their solidarity.

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APPENDIX JANE AUSTEN’S DEFENSE OF THE NOVEL

Here is Jane Austen’s ‘Defense of the Novel’ in context where it appears in

Volume 1, Chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey. This paragraph begins in the midst of the chapter. However, the end of the ‘Defense’ also marks the end of the chapter.

The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. 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. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short,

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only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it. (30-31)

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kadesh Lauridsen received a Bachelor of Arts in English Education at the

University of North Florida. In order to expand her ability to engage in critical literary discourse, she pursued a Master of Arts in English with a focus on British Romanticism at the University of Florida. Her master’s research explored the role of nature in the work of Jane Austen. Kadesh completed her doctorate of English at the University of

Florida with a study of eighteenth-century British women writers as a community. During her time at the University of Florida, she presented her work at The Jane Austen

Society’s Annual Conference, The Frances Burney Society’s Annual Conference, and the British Women Writers Association’s Annual conference. She also completed a

Certificate in Women’s Studies to supplement her Doctorate in Philosophy.

As she moves forward, Kadesh plans to pursue her passion for teaching composition and literature while writing about issues of import to women of the past and the present.

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