Review: Munster Village by Mary Hamilton

Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village can be found in a collection called ‘Mothers of the Novel’ that was published in the ‘80s. I had a mixed bag with my anthology of women’s amatory tales of the early eighteenth century but these were later, from the 1770s to the 1830s, with Munster Village being written in 1778.

It’s a remarkably inconsistent book and, in its brief 150 pages lurches in tone, style and purpose.

It starts off with a fairly engaging description of an ambitious Lord who is disappointed in his political endeavours and responds by sulking. He has two children who are being raised by guardians far more moral than he. His son’s guardian is raising the boy along with his own daughter and of course the son of the Lord loves the daughter, so does the Lord. His son runs off with the woman they both love and he disowns him.

The couple live long enough to have a son and daughter of their own, then the Lord dies, his son dies and the wife dies - leaving the estate to the daughter, Lady Frances, who takes the children in.

All these shenanigans only really exist to get the estate of Munster Village into Lady Frances’s care so she can turn it into an arts and crafts utopia. There are workshops, a garden by Capability Brown and, at the centre, a grand library. Women are not excluded from this educational Eden, being given places to learn, to create and to grow. Lady Frances also takes in women who have been ill-treated by their husbands and provides them with a safe respite. One of these women says a line I think I’ve read quoted somewhere else, “I hate your wise ones, there is no opinion so absurd but it hadn’t been mentioned by some philosopher.” Though I’m not sure where I would have heard it before.

The majority of the first volume is taken up with describing this paradise, but not really how it works. We learn how it is laid out, are often told that it is beautiful and useful, and we also find out that the care taken in planning the place out increases its yield - but we don’t really get a clear picture of life there. We do learn that she uses buffaloes to drive her ploughs though - as they are stronger than oxen.

Then, when the young man comes of age, there’s a grand presentation where she gives Munster Village to him and finds herself free to marry Lord Darnley, a man she has long loved but felt she couldn’t marry until she has fulfilled her duties to niece and nephew.

In the second volume, it’s revealed the nephew is very upset. He’s fallen in love with two unattainable women and can’t decide which he loves, or if he can get any. The daughter goes to London where she assesses her picks of husband and writes to her friend. These letters are the liveliest parts of the book where she and her friend laugh at an old lady who “has more diseases than even Galen knows of, and a cough that relieves he of teeth”, or at a stupid lady who “seems to be a person created, rather to fill up a vacuum in nature than perform any good in it.” She’s also shocked at the fashionable women’s need to kneel in their sedan chairs because there’s no room for their enormous wigs otherwise.

There then follows a vast succession of interrelated amatory tales, whole novels worth of plot told in a few pages. Some about cruel fathers, others about brigands, one about the cruelty of being a galley slave - a plight described in detail (including the detail that the slaves row completely naked, wouldn’t that chafe?). All these events transpire so our young people and all their friends can be happily matched by the end of the book. 

The book ends with a masque give to celebrate Frances’s birthday, where figures from history all come forward to tell their stories and to praise the wisdom of Lady Frances. There’s a huge, long part that cribs off Ossian, making something more turgid than Ossian - Ossian fan-fic.

Then the book ends.

This is such a strange and inconsistent book. Is it a philosophical description of a utopia? A political novel? A series of amatory tales? Sometimes it’ll drag for pages, such as the masque and description of the layout of the village and sometimes it’ll cram series worth of events in a few paragraphs. The strangest element is how the book is mostly told in the past tense but will have the occasional sentence or paragraph in the present tense. All of this means that a slim book feels interminably long. While there were plenty of interesting and/or entertaining elements to pluck out the book, it barely holds together as one piece. I look forward to more luck with the next book of the series I read. 

Review: The Adventures of Eovaai by Eliza Haywood

 The Adventures of Eovaai immediately caught my attention by being one of the stranger titled works of one of my favourite eighteenth century authors, Eliza Haywood, someone who writes with a strange, over the top quality in itself. It’s a weird blend of fantasy, political satire and amatory novel which I found less consistently enjoyable than other works but it had its moments.

The book was initially published anonymously despite Haywood being a big name, presumably to aid the pretence that this is the work of a translator, bringing a work that has been long studied in China and which took place before the Garden of Eden. The second edition, which came out four years later, has her name on the cover. It may also be that publishing this book anonymously was a way to avoid the consequences of a story which casts the famously litigious ‘prime minister’ of the country as the villain.

Eovaai is a princess who has been raised to be a fair and compassionate ruler. When her father dies, he gives her a magic jewel which keeps both the kingdom and ruler safe. The jewel is kept safe by being set in a necklace but interested in an inscription on the other side, she proses it out where it is promptly stolen by a bird. Being the Queen who lost the jewel, her authority is diminished and the country descends into civil war, not only that but she is not personally protected and is easily taken by the wizard Ochihatou.

If the fact that Ochihatou was the sole/prime minister of a neighbouring country doesn’t ring Robert Walpole alarms, the fact that the first sentence about him describes him as ‘The Great Man’ should. The word ‘great’ was long established as describing Walpole by this point and would be the whole crux of Fielding’s later novel Jonathan Wild, in which the main joke is that greatness is the enemy of goodness. Haywood, not the subtlest of writers, makes her Walpole stand-in, Ochihatou, truly odious. He is ugly, bent and deformed but uses his nefarious magic to create what Doctor Who would describe as a perception filter around him. Using this borrowed stateliness and charm he worms into the King of Hyptofa’s court and bewitches him with a magic feather. Thus in power he lines his own pockets with unfair taxes, creates a standing army to strong-arm opponents and fills all key roles with family and sycophants - all things Walpole’s enemies accused him of. He even almost manages to seduce Eovaai but is interrupted by court business.

At this point the book is interrupted by the story of Yximilla, and here I think it becomes very clear how much fun Haywood is having naming her distant countries and people. Yximilla is a queen in love with the noble Yamatalallabec (the best name in the book) but the evil Boscomon, king of a small principality, has teamed up with the ferocious queen Tygrinonniple to invade Yximilla’s country of Ginksy, force her to marry him and rule together. Yximilla calls on Osiphronoropho, the King of Fayoul to help her but he is too far away to launch an immediate campaign. From this paragraph alone, I think it’s clear how the names, while fun really do send the reader’s eyes swimming and the complex war/political story that plays out with them in not helped by that fact. It’s not a happy ending for Yximilla, she is captured, drugged and dragged to the altar where she is forced to marry - ending any hope for her and ending the little interlude.

Ochichatou has been called to court to advise on what his country should do about the situation and when he returns, Eovaai has escaped by being whisked away by a good spirit. She finds herself still in the land of Hypotofa and sees how ruined it has become by Ochihatou’s bad management. Then she enters the stronghold of the resistance and hears a long speech by the leader of the patriots. Not so incidentally, the Patriots were the name the anti-Walpole resistance gave themselves and the speech is essentially an article by their leader, Bolingbroke. She escapes to the safer country of Oozof, which is a republic and is ranted at again, this time about the benefits of republics over monarchies. These parts were the draggier parts of the novel, being largely undigested political speeches.

However, the action ramps up again after Eovaai is kidnapped from Oozof and brought back to Ochihatou’s love pad. There she sees a monkey who hands her a tablet with some words on, these words turn her into a human and we hear her story. The monkey used to be a woman called Atamadoul and she was the maid of a beautiful princess that Ochihatou wanted to marry. Unfortunately for the Big O, the princesses parents wouldn’t allow it but Atamadoul the maid was in love and disguised herself as the princess to make a midnight flit. While disguised Ochihatou put a ring on her finger which would magically force her to lust over him constantly and away they flew. However, when they got back to Ochihatou’s love pad, he realised that she was someone else and was so furious he changed her into a monkey. Even crueller, he chained her to the wall of his love pad so she would be forced to watch him having sex with other people, the ring of lust making it even more torture to see. Most cruelly, he occasionally torments her with a horny baboon who he allows to almost rape her and says he’ll let it go all the way one day. Utterly horrifying and peculiar, you never know where you’ll end up with when Eliza Haywood goes full excess. Atamadoul has a plan, when Ochihatou returns to have his evil way, request the light is off, place her in human mode and let her take Eovaai’s place on the bed. They carry out this plan, of course Eovaai watches but then the light is turned on and Ochihatou sees the trick. Poor Atamadoul is turned into a rat this time and we don’t see her again.

However, the light has been turned on because the patriots are storming his house and he grabs Eovaai and runs off to a safe country with a sob tale about the evil patriots trying to kill their king. This ruse lasts a little while but the wizard is rumbled again and decides to whisk Eovaai back to her home country where he can marry her and run her land for his pleasure and gain. Weirdly, despite the magical flying crystals, the chariots pulled by doves and antelopes, Ochihatou says they only way they can get back is by stripping naked to be changed into birds. This means that when they land if Eovaai’s country they are naked and Ochihatou ties her to a tree by her hair and grabs some stinging nettles to torture her into accepting him.

This is when a hunk comes in and saves her. The hunk has also saved the country from the civil war and is acting as Protector. They fall instantly in love but there’s a hitch, he is only allowed to love the woman who has the case for a sacred jewel he’s found. To no reader’s surprise it turns out to be the sacred jewel from the beginning of the book and Eovaai has the necklace to put it in. They marry, the man is also the prince of Hypotofa so the two countries unite and have a great future. Ochihatou has run into a tree and killed himself by this point.

So, there we have it. Truly one of the stranger works of fiction knocking about and in parts great fun for its shocking nastiness, it’s silly naming and a fairy tale ending. It also has that boring run in the middle though. As such, this is probably the weakest of Eliza Haywood’s books that I have read so far but it is still worth a read just to go on the peculiar and improbable journey.

The introduction makes a lot of points about the footnotes that Haywood uses in the book. How they are a cacophony of voices, from the supposed translator of the book, especially his own views the centuries of scholars who have commentated on the book in China. The translator has a  problem with a particular commentator who interprets the events in the most misogynistic ways and corrects him on a number of points. Although the footnotes were a fun element, I feel that Eliza Haywood could have used them more playfully and added more jokes and tangents, as they were used in Pope’s Dunciad. They weren’t an un-fun addition, but there could have been more.

My Year of Reading Women

My year of reading women didn’t start intentionally. I started making a pile of books I wanted to read during the year and I noticed that all the books I had piled were by women writers. I thought it may be fun to keep piling up women writers and to see if a year of reading women taught me anything. I expected it probably wouldn’t, but I kept on anyway.

As a proviso - I have read some men this year. Seven of the eighty-eight books I have read this year have been by men. Two were for the reading circle, two were for work, one was for a video and two because I just had to read them. Also, an additional three books were written by a woman but translated by a man (but they were the Magda Szabó books and I have no regrets).

So, what did I learn?

In some ways, my year of reading women re-enforced my feeling that genre defines a book far more than any other element. Women sci-fi novels were more like sci-fi than anything else, women biographers, women gothic novelists, women fantasy writers - genre always trumps gender.

There have been more female protagonists, which is no great surprise but that’s not to say that many of the books featured men as the main character as well. I suppose family has been a theme more prominent in the books I’ve read this year. Whether it’s been French women tearing apart a family in Someone at a Distance or a French girl proving the perfect daughter in A Daughter in a Fortnight; a cultish family in The Water Clue or the cosy family of Hitlers in Young Adolf - families were a key element. There were surrogate parents, found families, displaced families and feuding families.

Other odd links between books included people who could dream new pasts. There were numerous books that included uses of sympathetic magic that included magic sewing and a magic model town. A number of spinsters looked after their novelist fathers, and two characters were locked up for suspected witchcraft.

This was the year I finished my last Penelope Fitzgerald, exposed myself to more Austen and was introduced to two writers in particular. Magda Szabó entered my life in the delightful Abigail, which balanced school story charm and WWII resistance excitement. Her other novels were a little more bleak; Katalin Street was a complex and engaging look at nostalgia, shame and bitterness, The Door was about independence and pride and so was Iza’s Ballad to a certain extent. Most luckily, I broke my Virginia Woolf taboo, finding her surprisingly warm, with real and fully-developed characters. 

I’ve really enjoyed my year of reading women but maybe because of my varied reading diet, it didn’t bring any amazing revelations. It did, however, lead me to a great many enjoyable books and I shall go through the top ten over the next couple of weeks.

It's funny, some people would be able to write a whole blog out of their experiences in reading a little differently, I barely managed a post.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft at the Dr Johnson Reading Circle

Tuesday 10th November 2020 was a big day for Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It not only was it the day on which was unveiled a statue erected to commemorate her at Newington Green, but more importantly, it was the day was appointed for Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle to discuss the most popular of her works, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. William Godwin, her future husband, would say of it, ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.’ Would it charm the grizzled online attendees of Dr Johnson’s Reading Circle?

Located very late in ‘our’ period, Mary Wollstonecraft has one foot firmly in the earlier ‘rational’ culture but another in the brewing maelstrom of Romanticism and this ambivalence is reflected in the book. It combines passages, some arguably purple, about the beauty of the Scandinavian landscapes with thoughtful assessment of land-use and its practical impact on the societies she travels through. 

Like Johnson exploring the Western Isles of Scotland, Wollstonecraft was travelling a landscape without an established travel itinerary. But unlike him, she was not travelling with a sociable native. She was either entirely alone, or had only her two-year-old daughter and her nursemaid for company. Nor did she know anything of Scandinavian languages. As Johnson travelled further away from Edinburgh, it was through a country perceived as still rising from barbarism. Similarly, Wollstonecraft traced a route from the relatively civilized to the still barbarous as she travelled from Sweden into Norway, furthest away from ruling Denmark. However, where a lack of trees prompted Johnson’s snark about the value of wood and a range of practical ideas on how to encourage tree growth, the stark rocks of Norway impact Wollstonecraft in a different way. Her response is an strongly emotional one, particularly when she arrives at a claustrophobic town penned in by looming cliffs: to her it seemed like a prison. When she travels further inland and into a forest, she too reflects on the usefulness of wood as a commodity and on the encroachments and improvements of farming. But unlike Johnson, she also reflects on the beauty of the light through the leaves and the calming effect of nature on her soul.

These passages show a deep emotional engagement with the natural world where she notes that the ‘rocks aspiring towards the heaven’ succeed in ‘shutting our sorrow’ and allow peace to ‘steal along the lake to calm my bosom.’ Later Mary Shelley, her younger daughter, when touring Switzerland, would read aloud from the book to her husband, Percy Shelley. Wollstonecraft’s book inspired other Romantics. Surely her description of a huge waterfall inspired Coleridge’s ‘chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething’ in ‘Kubla Khan’? Another of Coleridge’s poems, ‘Frost at Midnight’, seems to draw strongly on Wollstonecraft’s vision in depicting the poet as parent, lost in ‘abstruser musings’ by the fireside on a wintry night. Wollstonecraft had described a similar night in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in which she ‘contemplated, fearless of idle questions, a night such as which I had never before seen or felt to charm the senses or to calm the heart.’ In Coleridge’s poem, he too is soothed by the peaceful presence of child sleeping in a cot beside him, and on the peaceful calm outside:

‘… at my side 

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 

'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs 

And vexes meditation with its strange 

And extreme silentness.’

However, Wollstonecraft’s travels engage her analytical mind as much as her sentiments. She had been caught in the whirlwind of the French Revolution. This book finds her at a moment balanced finely between hope and fear. She frequently speaks of her hopes for the future, her belief that the world is improvable and improving, yet she finds greater freedoms in the places further removed from these improvements. When she contemplates Copenhagen, not looking its best after a terrible fire, she sees a decayed society ready for revolution and deplores the selfish nature of those trying to save their own houses from being pulled down and letting the fire rage out of control. At the end of her journey, when she travels to Hamburg, she finds a city where the deposed aristocracy of France are attempting to build businesses among the already established merchants of the city. What should be a place where ideas trade as freely as commodities, she finds a narrow-minded, money-grubbing smallness of vision where a love of wealth displaces a love of people. 

There’s also a vulnerability about Wollstonecraft that is exposed by her recently becoming a mother. She had strongly advocated female education in Vindication of the Rights of Women, arguing that if women were weaker it was only because they had been trained to be so. Now a mother herself, she doubts her ability to raise and educate her daughter. But it is less self-doubt, but a questioning of whether the world is ready to accommodate a woman equipped with an education that would allow her to show her full talents. Yet as she fears for the world her daughter will inherit, she maintains a hope that the world can be made better.

The book, for all its beauty and hope is followed by a dark shadow. Wollstonecraft did not make the trip as a mere jolly: she went to contract business for her lover, the father of her daughter, Gilbert Imlay. The relationship, kindled in revolutionary Paris, had begun to disintegrate: mere weeks before she left on the journey, she had tried to kill herself with laudanum. Shortly after returning, she was to make another attempt at ending her life, throwing herself off Putney Bridge. There are times in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark where she admits to a profound melancholy. The word itself appears many times in the book and suggests a suffering that is in some way beautiful. But her private letters to Imlay (when she tends to talk of depression rather than melancholy) betray a far bleaker sense of hopelessness and despair. Yet the book isn’t weighted down by this sadness, there’s a notion of healing through nature. This seems strangely apt for us reading the book in yet another period of lockdown, when walking through parks is one of few permitted recreations. There are moments of peace, joy and hope for the future which burst out of the book, all the more powerful for the dark place they spring from.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark inspired a lot of conversation in the group. Among other subjects we discussed methodism and wondered if Lutheranism, with its happy Sundays, was a comparatively less dour form of Protestantism. We also considered the shades of meaning covered by the word ‘tolerable’ and the ever-so-slightly different etymologies of ‘innoxious’ and ‘innocuous’ (broadly with the same meaning but the second starting life in zoology). 

There was also discussion of the new statue.

The Mary on the Green campaign has campaigned and raised money for a statue dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft on Newington Green for the past decade. In 2018, the two shortlisted designs were announced: a traditional depiction of Mary in bonnet and frock with a pile of books and a quill to be cast in bronze by Martin Jennings, and Maggi Hambling’s silvered naked woman emerging from a wave of feminine forms, described as a statue for Mary, not of her. Hambling’s design was chosen, and perhaps unsurprisingly has provoked instant controversy: some of us remember the early reactions to ‘The Scallop’ on Aldeburgh beach, her commemoration of Benjamin Britten, now much loved. The general mood of the group, none of us having yet gone to see it, was that if the statue was striking, controversial and deserving of comment and debate, which would seem to make it fit Mary Wollstonecraft quite admirably.

Review: Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

Todays post is about my initial thoughts about this book, next weeks shall be my report of the Dr Johnson's Reading Circle reading.

 In 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft went to Norway to transact business for Gilbert Imlay, common-law husband and father of her daughter, who she took with her. The relationship was already in terminal decline and the week before she left on her journey she’d already tried to commit suicide with Laudanum. Already the author of Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindication of the Rights of Women and a novel, so she decided to make a little money with a travel book.

…And it’s a wonderful example of the genre. Wollstonecraft has an ability to describe the sublime and the beautiful in a way that evokes memories of similar feelings I’ve had and, what is more amazing, doesn’t bore the shit of of me. How many travelogues and novels have tried to describe dramatic landscapes and raise my flagging sensibilities but succeeded in putting me to sleep? As well as all this, the descriptions are mixed with interesting readings of social and political life and some genuinely interesting reveries. The book shows a keen mind married to depth of feeling with  the ability to actually craft meaningful prose out of it.

I warmed to the book on the first page, where she is in a boat in peril off the Swedish coast and remarks that in England, there’d be a rash of lifeboats out to save them, though this isn’t due to any special English benevolence but because they’d be paid per rescue. 

The journey itself involved travelling into Sweden, where her two year old daughter, Fanny and her nurse were left behind while she went into Norway to set about the legal wrangling she’s been sent to sort out. Coming back, she then meets up with her baby, travels through Denmark and into Germany where she took a boat back to England from Hamburg. 

Sweden she finds a worn down, with lots of people merely existing, an impression that strengthens after she returns from Norway, which she finds to be more independent. Worse that Sweden is Denmark, especially Copenhagen, which had burnt down months before and was not looking its best but, for Wollstonecraft, the worst place she visits is Hamburg. It’s a town where the nouveaux riche and the fallen French aristos mix, though that’s not the problem, it’s the money-grabbing narrow-mindedness of the place. I found it funny read of Wollstonecraft talking about the Scandinavian countries as places on their way out of barbarism as they’re now ofte considered as models of statehood.

She mixes with people, very few of which she can properly communicate with and spends as much time as she can outside by herself, admiring a field “enamelled with the sweetest wild flowers” and a great many impressive rocks. She finds it hard to be social, not only can she speak none of the languages, she doesn’t enjoy the forms of entertainment her hosts have for her, eating very large dinners in stuffy, closed rooms accompanied by lots of booze and smoking. She also takes up rowing, which gives her plenty of fresh air and time to think, “my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars.”

Many of her thoughts are about, “my favourite subject of contemplation, the future improvement of the world.” She has a really interesting view of progress, in general it was extremely positive, convinced that ‘civilisation is a blessing.’ She even says that  “The increasing population of the earth must necessarily tend to its improvement, as the means of existence are multiplied by improvements.” She sees this is particularly true in the case of women, where she sees greater cultural and social capital having a trickle-down effect and raising the possibilities for women above mere domestic drudges. 

She’s also worried about progress, she lambasts the avariciousness of early capitalism and the way it can narrow minds to anything but money. At one point she worries about the future when humans have used up all resources and even moved into the wildernesses of Norway. She admits it’s a silly thing to worry about that may not come to pass for thousands of years, something which was very uncomfortable to this reader two-hundred and twenty years later living in a time where her fear could take place in the next eighty years.

As she says, “common minds rarely break through general rules,” and Mary Wollstonecraft clearly has no common mind. She dismisses the notion of national characteristics, especially the notion of them being formed by weather or landscape but shaped by social systems. She also sees this simplification of complex systems to be an easy cop-out for writers who should do better. 

     “The most essential service, I presume that authors could render to society, would be to promote enquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical assertions which only appear calculated to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles.”

Of course, one of her big interests is the life of women in the countries she visits, apologising for, “still harping on the same subject you will exclaim- How can I avoid it when most of the struggles of my eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex.”

One of the other interesting little ideas is one she has about how “the preservation of the species, not the individual, that is the design of the Deity,” - a very interesting notion that points to Darwin.

The thing that makes the book really spark, is the sense of vulnerability. There are many luminous, numinous moments in the book but there’s always a sense that they’re moments of joy that bring light in a bedrock of distress. She’s so aware of her own passions, declaring that she “must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness,” and that she has to “catch pleasure pleasure on the wing - I may be melancholy tomorrow.” This is an author who’d tried to kill herself mere weeks before writing the book, and would try again shortly after.

   “How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. O have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; - I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself.”

The Oxford World’s Classics edition of this book also has excerpts of the genuine letters she wrote to Gilbert Imlay as the trip progressed. From these letters it’s clear that the journey was much harder and Wollstonecraft’s emotional pain much stronger than the published book shows. It’s clear that Imlay is not answering letters and if he is, he’s replying in simple business terms. She spends many of these letters describing her pain and demanding that Imlay either properly commits to her and his daughter, or makes a certain decision to leave them which he doesn’t seem to do. She goes through the pain of breakup, sometimes excusing Imlay, 

“my imagination is perpetually shading your defects,” and other times relishing his being out of her life as, “this heart is worthy of the bliss its feelings anticipate.” Those real letters are a difficult read, showing genuine pain that does enter into the published work but in a way that elevates that book beyond ordinary travelogue.

The title may not suggest much but the book is certainly worth a read.

Review: Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood

The Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected came out a year after Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded and a month after An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews and unlike the other two books, was not a debut novel but one by established novelist, Eliza Haywood. 

Unlike Shamela, it is not a direct parody but seems more a response, Haywood is trying to show how a proper novelist deals with the same films. As such, Anti-Pamela shows the flaws in Pamela by comparison, but inadvertently shows the strengths of Pamela when compared to Anti-Pamela. As such, the book is not in itself anti Pamela, but that the main character, Syrena is herself the opposite of Pamela.

Much like Pamela, Syrena is heavily influenced by her upbringing. Pamela’s parents are near saintly, but Syrena is raised by a mother who trains her beautiful daughter to find the best ‘deal’ with her beauty. For Pamela, being ‘ruined’ is losing her virginity but for Syrena, being ‘ruined’ is losing her virginity without a decent cash payoff. In many ways, the best relationship is between this mother, who wants the best for her daughter as she sees it and Syrena, who isn’t mature enough to put the mother’s lessons properly into practise.

Unlike Pamela, Anti-Pamela doesn’t focus on one situation in a claustrophobic house but moves from one ‘adventure’ (a word with sexual overtones in the eighteenth century) to another. In the first, Syrena, who has been bred up to ‘bag’ a rich man, is languishing as an apprentice in a small dressmakers. On a trip to buy lace, she meets a man in a brocaded hat who offers to buy her stockings and there’s sexual tension with the nature of the purchase. Falsehood being ingrained in her she, pretends to ‘seem coy, but such a coyness to give him room to fancy I might at last be won.” The man quickly seduces her, much to her mother’s dismay as he wasn’t sufficiently rich. She has to move back to her mother’s and has “an abortion to the great joy of mother and daughter.”

The second adventure is the closest to Pamela, as Syrena becomes the maid to an elderly lady and both the father and the son latch on her instantly. It’s clear that she is seen as sexually available to the men of the family and is her job to manipulate both men and decide which will give her the best deal, as the elder’s mistress or the younger’s wife. There’s a greater sense of the workings of the household and her place within it; all clearly shown by the geography in the house and the timetable of the servants. There was a wonderful sense of what is was like to be one of the higher servants in a house, especially how many of the higher servants are largely decorative and have little to do, which makes them easier to get alone. At one point, the younger man waits in the old lady’s cupboard for three hours waiting for her. The end of this adventure shows how Syrena and her mother have no compunction in ruining people’s lives. They set up a fake-rape and accuse the son of perpetrating it, he even goes to prison. The aim is to drop the charges in return for marriage, with Syrena having no worry about marrying a man who hates her in return for money. However, the discovery of the mother’s letters to Syrena undoes their plan and they have to go in hiding in Greenwich.

The book then goes through another series of adventures and each one works for a while but is ultimately unsuccessful which limits future pickings. Things get more desperate as Syrena’s total head-turning beauty has a very small window. She’s not even 17 by the end of the book. 

At one point, Syrena leaves her mum after argument in which Syrena wants to be more sexual in her advances as the coy-game is taking too long. She becomes the kept woman of a tradesman who almost bankrupts his family for her but also falls in love with a handsome man who uses her for money as she uses the tradesman. 

Finally, she falls in love with an elderly man and ‘lets’ him talk her into marriage. Syrena’s mother says that he’s their best bet as only an elderly man would choose to marry his maid. The wedding is almost prepared and the night before it, she is introduced to the old man’s son. To her horror, the son is the handsome man who had previously used her. Again, her plans are foiled by her own indiscretions and she is packed up to be isolated in Wales.

Although there were letters in the book, it was not out-and-out epistolary, with the adventures linked together and occasionally told by a narrator. This narrator means the book doesn’t keep circling the same ideas again and again and gets the story moving. As such, the biggest implied criticism Anti-Pamela makes of Pamela is that it is too stuck in one place, containing too little incident. However, the accumulation of incident does mean that we don’t live in the character’s minds to the same extent, while I may not be Pamela’s biggest fan, Anti-Pamela does show a new direction that novels could, and did take.

(On a little note about my copy, I had the Broadview edition edited by Catherine Ingressia, which also included Shamela. For the most part, I found it a brilliant edition but I was rather irritated by the footnotes. It had the American ‘thing’ of describing well-known London locations but it also explained very common phrases as if they were something strange and archaic. Do people really not understand what ‘fast and loose’ means?)

Review: 'Charlotte' by Kathryn Shevelow

In 1717 a four year old girl woke up and got out bed. She went downstairs where she found her father’s coat and sword but most importantly, his luscious, bouffant periwig. She walked out the house and went into a ditch, where she marched up and down, doing impressions of her father in as gruff a voice as her young larynx would allow. People stopped to look at the strange vision, a miniature version of one of the most famous actors of the day. Her father was Colley Cibber, the little girl was Charlotte.

Charlotte and I have met a number of times. She’s popped up in original cast lists of Fielding plays, she’s appeared lurking around in various Hogarth prints, she took part in Christopher Smart’s Mother Midnight transvestite review. 

However, I first met her in the book Midnight Mirage by Karen Harper. I’d picked up that book at a bus stop for its garish cover but find inside a well researched and fascinating story taking characters from history, including Charlotte Cibber, who I’d described as ‘a liberated crossdresser who was much fun’.

I’ve had this biography sitting on my shelves for a number of years and I am so upset I hadn’t picked it up sooner, as it is a well told story about an engaging person living in a fascinating world. In some ways it would be much better to talk about Charlotte and define her separate from the men in her life but it’s not possible, the fact that she was daughter to a leading actor, that her older brother, Theophilus viewed the Drury Lane Theatre as his birthright; that she’d grown up into (what could have become) an acting dynasty, that she so identified life with theatre that she would always use a theatrical reference to explain it (like nerds and their media) and that she spent a large part of her career performing parodies of her male relatives, mean that she is inextricably linked to them. 

I really took to her as described in this book, much as I did in the novel. She seems to be such a resolute, playful individual. When her family disowned her, she simply worked for a rival theatre company. When the new licensing laws shut that down, she had elaborate puppets made and put on plays. When she got sick and had to sell the puppets (at a loss) she starts selling oil, then sausages, then becomes a strolling actor, then an author - she simply doesn’t give up. 

For a while she ran her own theatre company called the ‘Mad Company’. They performed The Beggar’s Opera in Roman dress and planned on a revival of Samuel ‘Magotty’ Johnson’s Hurlothrumbo with Charlotte as a cross-dressed Lord Flame (though whether is stilts, it wasn’t said). 

This was about the time Charlotte started dressing as a man off stage as well as on. Why, exactly she did it can only be speculated on, it probably fulfilled many different needs at different points in her life. It’s certain that she spent a period of her life as ‘Mr Brown’ with a woman known as ‘Mrs Brown’ but the extent of that relationship isn’t clear. Nor is it clear how much her crossdressing were factors in her family disowning her, but there is something fascinating about a woman who lived boldly as herself (whatever that self actually was).

I have Colley Cibber’s memoirs, I’d love a copy of Charlotte’s - though this biography gives us more just a life, it’s a really good summary of the politics and the precarious lives of actors. We also meet people like Theophilus, in the novel I described him as, “a selfish, vindictive, tosser who spends his wife’s money on gambling and has no theatrical knowhow.’ This book agrees that he was a difficult man but not that he was untalented. I was fascinated to learn that he was born during the Great Storm and saw that a metaphor for his life and relationships, finally he would die in a little storm in a boat travelling to Ireland. For all of his excesses (and it’s hard not to see him as a villain when it comes to Susannah Arne - the topic of the novel), I felt sorry for him. He was a man who could never quite become the person he thought he should, and he stuck with Charlotte when no one else did.

He deserved better, as did Charlotte - I’m beginning to think Colly deserved less. Thankfully though, Charlotte has received fair, even glowing treatment in this utterly readable and very interesting biography.

Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730 (Title Page)

Having worked through this anthology systematically, it seemed sensible to have a page where each review can be linked to with maybe a small summary review of each piece.

This is that page.
The History of a Nun by Aphra Behn
A constant surprise and delight with a great ending.

The Secret History of Queen Zarah by Delrivier Manley (but not actually)
A little flat, not particularly sparkling characters but interesting to read after watching the film ‘The Favourite’.

Love Intrigues by Jane Barker
A well told story of miscommunicated love with a slightly disappointing ending.

The Adventures of the Count de Vinevil by Penelope Aubin
Racist, islamaphobic, all together icky and generally unpleasant which made in engaging in an anti-likeable way.

The British Recluse by Eliza Haywood
Well told brace of ‘rake’ stories which are good examples of their genre and don’t go on forever and have an empowering ending, unlike some (*cough* Clarissa *cough*).

Fantomina by Eliza Haywood
Utterly nutty and daft with a wonderfully batty story seen through to the bitter end. Best story here.

The Reformed Coquette by Mary Davys
Also wonderfully over the top, especially in terms of all the cartoony-sneaky rakes who want to abduct our heroine. Second best book here. 

Extracts from Friendship in Death by Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Perhaps this makes sense in full better than as extracts, but letters from dead people to living, telling them all the secrets they’ve learned since they died, it’s rather strange.

Review: Friendship in Death by Elizabeth Singer Rowe

The last part of this anthology consists of only a selection from the text, which is a pity because if any text in this anthology deserves the chance to speak fully for itself it’s ‘Friendship in Death’ by Elizabeth Singer Rowe. The notion is not completely original, there’s a late classical model, but there’s something very strange about the central notion, dead people writing to the living.

The selection is such: The first is a letter to an atheist Lord from a friend declaring that atheism might not be the way forward; the second is the two year old son of a countess asking why she mourns his death when he’s having a great time with the cherubim, the third is a woman now glad she died before running off with a young lover, the fourth is a very confusing story about mislaid babies which may mean he is the recipient’s dead lover and brother and the fifth is a dead brother telling his sister how great it is to be dead.

It strikes me that this book points to the morbid and sentimental excesses of the Victorian Era in all of it’s cloying unpleasantness. Or it’s yet another innovative way to tell the same four stories about rakes, shepherds and such. I’m not sure. Perhaps it makes better sense as a whole.

Whichever it is, these extracts are such an unsettling and destabilising way of ending the anthology, I have to applaud them.

Review: The Reformed Coquette by Mary Davys

The Reformed Coquette by Mary Davys is definitely my second favourite in this anthology. It’s another wonderfully over the top story that used elements from theatre but also elements which may look absurd in theatre and are, if anything, cartoon gags brought to the page.

Our latest woman with an improbable and unmemorable name is Amoranda and I hope it’s no surprise that she is exceedingly attractive and witty. From a very early age she is told of her beauty and she quickly believes it. She spurns her dollies and all childish amusements and works on practicing her languid looks and seductive poses. The mother and father, having her late in their lives, and she be the only surviving child, encourage this behaviour and very quickly snuff it, leaving her with everything and only a distant uncle as protector.

We know where this book is going, there’s a man called Lord Lofty who has nice legs and a winning way but it’s not as straightforward as that. Amoranda is not a pure innocent who shall be won over by the first tight-bunned bowing gentleman because she was a “Heart like a Great Inn, which finds room for all that come” and there are more people with designs on her. 

There are two other men, Froth and Callid - one being all affectation and the other dourness (guess which is which) and they are fed up of being played around by Amoranda, for there’s another thing about her, she may be a little too open and a little too keen on flattery but she’s no idiot. She also has a sense of humour. Amoranda enjoys playing them off with each other and the two of them off of Lord Lofty. 

She’s also one of the very few women characters I’ve read in eighteenth century literature who are described as witty and actually gets a chance to show it. When walking with Lord Lofty, she sees the other two men fishing and says to him, “Let’s go fish.” He, not happy with being blown off again declares, “hang the fish,” to which she replies, “I suppose we should, for they’ll not drown.” It’s not a great joke - but it is an actual joke and a far cry from Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia where we were told again and again of her wit and never saw it.

Back to Froth and Callid though, who plan to abduct Amoranda, one to rape her and the two to share their fortune. Luckily she find out about this plan but doesn’t know what to do about it. Again she’s in luck though as an agéd and bearded representative of her uncle turns up with a plan. He and a young manservant plan to dress as Amoranda and her maid, wait to be abducted and then beat the rapscallions up with cudgels. 

This plan works better than expected, the two cads hurt everywhere but their tongues and are quickly sent packing. They also blame each other for the plan going wrong and run each other through in a duel. This leaves only Lofty to dispatch of.

Again, just by chance, a young woman called Altimira passes by. She has a sob-story about the Lord Lofty. He was playing the typical rake game like Lysander before and had his wicked way with her, winning her over with a promise to marry which suspiciously disappeared - and which he’d accidentally dropped in Amoranda’s garden, getting ready to play the same trick again. This mean Amoranda (with the help of her uncle’s agéd friend) can force Lofty to marry Altimira, which is apparently a happy result.

And this should be where the book ends but it isn’t. It’s where things get truly weird.

On her way back from celebrating Lord Lofty and Altimira’s wedding, her coach is overtaken and overturned as armed men try and steal her away but are driven off by a group of men led by her uncle’s agéd friend. 

A little later a friend of Amoranda’s turns up with a friend of her own. Uncle’s agéd F is sure that the second woman is a man in disguise, but Amoranda thinks that a ridiculous premise. She admits, she finds it strange that the new woman doesn’t want to share a bed with her, but she must only be shy. It’s on a lovely boating trip for the three women into the impenetrable woods that Amoranda discovers it’s not so ridiculous after all. The enfrocked man and his evil, female accomplice drag her off, luckily she is rescued by a mysterious hot man she sort of recognises. There’s a fight and man-in-dress dies quite horribly, it also turns out he was the coach attacker earlier.

Now is the mystery, who was hot man and does it matter because uncle’s choice of husband is coming soon. Well, it’s all fine as uncle’s agéd bearded friend was none other than hot man, who is also uncle’s choice of husband. Amoranda did wonder why his beard never seemed to grow and was always so neat. 

They marry, happy endings all round - and it’s pretty obvious what a peculiarly cartoony piece of work it is, with it’s tidy sticky-on beard and men dressed as women who are mostly convincing. Not to mention people doing away with each other in duels and toffs leaving important secret boxes about. It’s not quite a parody of the genre, but it has enormous fun with the ridiculous nature of this kind of novel and I had fun with it.