The Excursion

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 1996 The Excursion Frances Brooke Paula R. Backsheider Auburn University Hope D. Cotton Auburn University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Brooke, Frances; Backsheider, Paula R.; and Cotton, Hope D., "The Excursion" (1996). Literature in English, British Isles. 101. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/101 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS BY WOMEN Isobel Grundy, Editor Advisory Board Paula R. Backscheider David L. Blewett Margaret A. Doody Jan Fergus J. Paul Hunter John Richetti Betty Rizzo THE EXCURSION Frances Brooke PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER & HOPE D. COTTON, EDITORS THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1997 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 96 97 98 99 00 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brooke, Frances, The excursion / Frances Brooke ; Paula R. Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton, editors. p. cm. — (Eighteenth-century novels by women) ISBN 0-8131-1979-0 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8131-1979-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) —ISBN 0-8131-0881-0 I. Backscheider, Paula R. II. Cotton, Hope D. III. Title. IV. Series. PR3326.B37B33 1997 823'.6—dc2O 96-26708 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Chronology xlvii Note on the Text li The Excursion Preface to the Second Edition 1 First Edition 3 Notes to the Novel 155 Revisions Made in the Second Edition 171 Selected Bibliography 179 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS uch of the work on this edition was done during the summer of 1994, Mwhile I directed an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers. I would like to thank the students in the seminar for their intellectual stimula- tion and practical contributions, especially those of Elizabeth Larsen, Carol Wilson, and Susan Westbury. Antonia Forster, a friend from my 1992 NEH Seminar, generously shared the Brooke entries from her forthcoming Index to Book Reviews in England, IJ49-IJJ4, volume 2. Hope and I are indebted to Linda Thornton, Glenn Anderson, Cassidy Chestnut, Boyd Childress, and many other members of the efficient, friendly Auburn University Library staff. We appreciate the help of Mary Kuntz, Samia Spencer, and John Richetti with foreign language annotations and thank Daniel Ennis, Elizabeth Russell, and Randall Smith for their help with the copy text. Support for the work has come from the West Point Pepperell— H.M. Philpott Fund, Auburn University. Paula Backscheider INTRODUCTION 'he heroine of Frances Brooke's The Excursion (1777) comes to London Twith a novel, an epic poem, and a tragedy, which she believes the guaran- tee of her fame and economic security. Brooke herself may not have arrived in London in 1748 with her luggage stuffed with manuscripts, but before she died at age sixty-five she had published almost every kind of economically profitable literary type—and succeeded notably at each. At the midpoint of her career, a reviewer for the Critical Review wrote that Brooke was so well known "it would be superfluous ... to say anything of her literary abilities." In the year The Excursion came out, a poem in the Monthly Review praised her and her generation of gifted women writers: To Greece no more the tuneful maids belong, Nor the high honours of immortal song; To Moore, Brooke, Lenox, Aikin, Carter due, Theirs the strong genius, theirs the voice divine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Laetitia Barbauld wrote that Brooke was "an elegant and accomplished woman" and "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style."1 EARLY LIFE Frances Moore Brooke was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Knowles Moore; she was christened on 24 January 1724 in the parish of Claypole, Lin- colnshire. Her father was curate there, and both her parents' families had x / INTRODUCTION produced generations of Lincolnshire clergymen.2 She and her two younger sisters were left fatherless in 1727, the year the youngest was born. Mary and her daughters moved in with Sarah Knowles, Mary's widowed mother in Peterborough, where they lived for ten years. Mary Moore died in 1737, the year after her mother; thirteen year-old Frances and her sisters were taken in by the Reverend Roger Steevens and his wife, Sarah, who was Mary's sister. In that same year, Frances's sister Catherine died, and the Steevens had a baby girl. Brooke's biographer Lorraine McMullen concludes that Frances and her youngest sister were happy in their new home and that both received a good education. Brooke's published works and translations demonstrate wide reading and knowledge of French and Italian. A contemporary biographer says that her mother gave her "a most excellent education,"3 but, brought up in homes with genteelly educated women and the libraries of generations of clergymen educated at Oxford and Cambridge, she was surrounded by extraordinary opportunities for cultivating her mind. When her surviving, younger sister reached age twenty-one, Brooke received the £500 her father had left her in trust4 and perhaps more from her mother, and by 1748 she was living in London. Numerous contemporaries describe Brooke as witty, intellectually en- gaging, widely read, "agreeable," and with a "literary turn." A notice of her death praises her for her "gentleness and suavity of manners."5 Several of her works are collaborative, and she seems to have had a gift for making and taking suggestions with grace and good judgment. The popular provin- cial theatre manager, playwright, and stage historian Tate Wilkinson, for instance, notes that her observations on his work were "given with affability, and proved to me of great advantage."6 In her early years in London, which was then still a small place with tight-knit literary communities, she made a number of friends who were firmly in such circles. The introduction to her first published play, Virginia, and other scattered allusions in letters and publications indicate that she was circulating manuscripts and discussing her writing with friends, a common practice among writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that approximated a form of publishing.7 The early 1750s was a good time to be a woman with literary aspira- tions. Women were well established and accepted as translators and poets, were increasingly writing and being commissioned to write essays, poems, and reviews for the numerous periodicals, and had made strides in establish- ing novel writing as respectable. Eliza Haywood's long novels, The History of Introduction / xi Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), had improved her reputation considerably;8 Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) had been a resounding critical and popular success, and novels such as Mary Collyer's Felicia to Charlotte (1744; vol. 2 in 1749) and Lennox's The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751) promised a line of Richard- sonian, moral, epistolary novels.9 No publisher now ignored female readers; indeed, these publications and others showed that the public would tolerate considerable originality from women writers. Encouraged and befriended by men like Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, women writers of these decades lived in what might be called a window of unusual tolerance. Before them, women writers often had scandalous reputations that discouraged other women from publishing;10 after them, women often felt restricted to a limited number of themes, settings, plots, and even characters. The playwright Hannah Cowley described vividly in 1786 the pressure her generation felt: "They will allow me, indeed, to draw strong character, but it must be without speaking its language. I may give vulgar or low bred persons, but they must converse in a stile of elegance. [T]he point to be considered, is ... whether Mrs. Cowley ought to have so expressed herself."11 The century abounds with jokes about young people arriving in London with tragedies in their hand luggage, and Brooke's Virginia. A Tragedy comes close to belonging to that category. Tragedy, after all, was still the prestige genre and the theatre the most lucrative literary marketplace. Authors of novels, collections, and books of poetry sold their manuscripts outright, but only the proven, best, and most entrepreneurial got either large sums or what we might call royalties at that time. In 1759, for example, Samuel Johnson received only f 100 for Rasselas and an additional £25 when the second edition was issued. Goldsmith received £60 for The Vicar of Wakefieldm 1762.12 The author of a successful play, however, got every third night's profits and some held contracts obligating them to deliver a new play regularly, an arrangement that all but guaranteed production. Playwrights often received over £100 for each benefit night. That the play would be produced by the company for which it was written was also an advantage because the parts would "fit" and provide attractive vehicles for stars who could help assure a hit. Brooke's Vir- ginia was not produced, however, because two other plays based on Livy's story of the tyrant Appius's desire for Virginia were on the stage at that time.

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