Abstract
This chapter highlights how pervasive Smith’s first novel Emmeline is within Austen. As the main Smith novel (aside from Ethelinde) to attract a specific notice from Austen (the oft-cited swoon over Delamere in the Juvenilia), Emmeline is signalled as foundational. More than that, however, the preponderance of the novel’s key plot points within a broad range of Austen novels allows for an exploration of how an author like Austen uses a template to ground her story-telling. The Emmeline template suggests that Austen invests her narrative with an analogous, albeit tempered, mood. The chapter will explore ideas of plunder, modelling, and the generic.
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Notes
- 1.
For Wollstonecraft, see her anonymous review in The Analytical Review (July 1788), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (1989, vol. 7, 22–27). For the ‘amiable authoress’, see the anonymous review in The Monthly Review. For both see Emmeline, ed. Loraine Fletcher (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 480.
- 2.
See Stephen Derry, ‘The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on Persuasion’, Persuasions 12 (1990), 69–70.
- 3.
In music, he calls this ‘plunderphonics’. See Voyce, ‘Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons’, Criticism 53 (2011), 407–438, 408.
- 4.
See Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- 5.
See Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
- 6.
Christina Lupton, ‘Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, English Literary History 81 (2014): 1173–1192, 1173.
- 7.
Goodman, ‘“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading’, Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010): 197–227, 200.
- 8.
Elizabeth Johnston argues that the novel offered a communal space for women to be with other women imaginatively, that it provided the fullest expression of female friendship. See ‘“Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender Ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 47.2 (2014), 1–21.
- 9.
Clifford Siskin, ‘Novels and Systems’, Novel 34.2 (2001), 202–215, 203.
- 10.
See The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2009), 179. Quoted in Kevis Goodman, ‘Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present’, English Literary History 81 (2014), 983–1006, 997–998.
- 11.
See Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, ‘Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History’, The Wordsworth Circle 140–148, 142.
- 12.
Ethelinde, where gossip creates Ethelinde’s reputation in the face of her model behaviour; Montalbert, where assumption and suspicion result in a catatonic Rosalie; Celestina, where a willingness to believe outrageous tale-telling nearly results in the permanent estrangement of Celestina and Willoughby…and so on.
- 13.
By contrast, Edgeworth’s Belinda stands by Mr. Vincent despite Clement’s utter romantic presence until the narrator can stand it no longer and creates a crisis that even Belinda can’t overlook.
- 14.
Smith gives Sir Richard a particular habit of speech which, although not exactly mirrored by Lady Catherine, conjures her up: ‘[T]here can be no reason, indeed none will be allowed, or listened to, or heard of, why you should not eagerly, and instantly, and joyfully accept a proposal so infinitely superior to what you have any claim, or right, or pretence to’ (134). Emmeline reacts with commendable Elizabeth-style indignation and disdain.
- 15.
Kelly A. Marsh notes that ‘elements of a narrative that appear to be expository, merely background, are signs of the submerged plot’. See ‘The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasures and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion’, Narrative 17.1 (2009), 76–94, 79.
- 16.
See Joe Bray for a discussion of free indirect discourse in Smith.
- 17.
Repetition: telling the beads, a circular tale, forever marking the same points at the same places.
- 18.
There are other echoes: of retrenchment, of gentry letting houses, and of course the polar opposites of the Crofts family and the Croft family.
- 19.
According to Melina Moe, Charlotte marries for security and this is what ends her intimate friendship with Elizabeth: she ‘represents past norms whose modern irrelevance is made apparent through the progress of the novel towards a culmination in two affective, consensual unions. Charlotte’s views … are anachronistic to developing standards of mutual regard that govern modern heterosexuality’. Charlotte is an example of a female character ‘whose personal fulfilment is not oriented to freedom, growth, and improvement’ and hence she is a challenge to critics of the ‘modern’ novel. See Moe, ‘Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’, English Literary History 83 (2016), 1075–1103, 1076, 1077.
Another way to regard Charlotte is that she makes a reasoned decision and then sticks to it. Is Charlotte, in this way, Mrs. Stafford tinged with Emmeline?
- 20.
Compare Emmeline’s Lord Montreville, obsessed with heraldry and the narrative embedded in his family crest.
- 21.
‘Submerged’, as Marsh calls it?
References
Bray, Joe. 2007. The “Dual Voice” of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment. Language and Literature 16: 37–52.
Derry, Stephen. 1990. The Ellesmeres and the Elliots: Charlotte Smith’s Influence on Persuasion. Persuasions 12: 69–70.
Gamer, Michael. 2019. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, Kevis. 2010. “Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading. Studies in Romanticism 49: 197–227.
Goodman, Kevis. 2014. Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Grounds of the Present. English Literary History 81: 983–1006.
Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2013. Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History. The Wordsworth Circle 44: 140–148.
Johnston, Elizabeth. 2014. “Deadly Snares”: Female Rivalry, Gender Ideology, and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers. Studies in the Literary Imagination 47: 1–21.
Lupton, Christina. 2014. Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel. English Literary History 81: 1173–1192.
Marsh, Kelly. 2009. The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasures and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion. Narrative 17: 76–94.
Mazzeo, Tillar. 2006. Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Moe, Melina. 2016. Charlotte and Elizabeth: Multiple Modernities in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. English Literary History 83: 1075–1103.
Siskin, Clifford. 2001. Novels and Systems. Novel 34: 202–215.
Voyce, Stephen. 2011. Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons. Criticism 53: 407–438.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1989. The Analytical Review. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 22–27. London: Pickering and Chatto.
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Labbe, J.M. (2020). Model: Emmeline. In: Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_2
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