Wednesday, 6 November 2024

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. 



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