Abstract
Since the novel of wifely adultery flourished in Continental Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century, and since during the same period adultery was all but taboo in Britain as a subject for serious fiction,1 three facts about earlier British literary history are arresting. First, adultery is a key theme in a large number of British narratives from the late Restoration till the end of the eighteenth century. Second, though claims for literary priority are always problematic, the work that might well be called the first British novel, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–7),2 is also a novel of adultery. Third, though the nineteenth-century novel of wifely adultery is an almost exclusively male-authored form,3 during the long eighteenth century many examples of British adultery fiction were written by women. This and the next two chapters discuss a range of such examples, both for their intrinsic value and for the light they cast on the question why the novel of wifely adultery never took root in Britain.
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Notes
See Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘The First English Novel: Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters, The Canon, and Women’s Tastes’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 8 (1989), 201–22.
See especially the reviews by E. P. Thompson, ‘Happy families’, New Society, 41 (1977), 499–501, and by Alan Macfarlane in History and Theory, 18 (1979), 103–26. Caroline Gonda summarizes the main issues at stake in Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709–1834: Novels and Society front Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
See Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, ed. by Maureen Duffy (London: Virago, 1987), p. vi. The earliest example of the name cited by OED to signify an accomplished lover dates from 1709, and of the verb ‘to philander’ from 1737.
H. J. Habbakuk, ‘Marriage Settlements in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 32 (1950), 15–30; cited by Christopher Hill in ‘Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times’, Essays in Criticism, 5 (1955), 315–40, repr. in Samuel Richardson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by John Carroll (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 102–23.
The Fair Jilt, in Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. by Paul Salzman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 93–6. As the final volume of Love-Letters was published in 1687, and The Fair Jilt was first published in 1688, it seems fair to assume that the story was written later than the novel, especially as Behn’s need for money at the time is likely to have hastened rather than delayed publication.
For this reason, too, John Richetti’s inference that the novel conveys ‘a longing for a meaningful, valid public life where ritual and communal expression correct the corrosive private hedonism the novel has relentlessly chronicled’ is preferable to Bradford K. Mudge’s contention that the characters in the novel ‘who approach love theologically (love can be only either true or false, right or wrong) are foolish victims’. Richetti derives his comment in part from the scene of Octavio’s ordination. See ‘Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister: Aphra Behn and Amatory Fiction’, in Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Mnrtirt C. Battestin, ed. by Albert J. Rivero (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 13–28 (p. 26); The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 134. In ‘Aphra Behn, Libertine’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 24 (2000), 75–97, M. L. Stapleton argues convincingly that ‘Behn excoriates the libertine as she depends utterly on him for the life of her plays, poems, and fiction’ (p. 77), though his view that Silvia illustrates ‘the corrosive effects of libertinism on women’ (p. 88) does not take sufficient account of the extent to which Behn dramatizes her heroine’s exploitation.
Madame Bovary: Provincial Lives, trans. by Geoffrey Wall (London and New York: Penguin, 1992); Madame Bovanj: moeurs de province, ed. by Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Garnier, 1971).
“‘Parents can oppose their children’s marriages, but children cannot prevent the follies of parents in their second childhood,” said Maitre Hulot to Maitre Popinot, the second son of the former Minister of Commerce, who mentioned the marriage to him’ (Cousin Bette, trans. by Sylvia Raphael [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 462; Balzac: La Comedie humaine, 12 vols, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex and others [Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81], VII, 451). Balzac not only mocks the speaker’s bourgeois sententiousness but deftly suggests how the lawyers are taking over. I owe this point to Arnold Kettle.
See G. B. Needham, ‘Mary de la Rivière Manley: Tory Defender’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 12 (1948–9), 255–89. John J. Richetti notes that the so-called seventh edition of 1736 appeared also in weekly instalments; see Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 123.
Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean, 2 vols (London: J. Morphew, 1709), repr. in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley 1705–1714, ed. by Patricia Köster, 2 vols (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1971), I, 265–804, and as The New Atalantis, ed. by Rosalind Ballaster (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991; London and New York: Penguin, 1992). Page references are given to both editions.
See John Cairncross, After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); and Ballaster, ‘Introduction’, New Atalantis, pp. viii–ix.
Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry, ed. by David Oakleaf, 2nd edn (Peterborough, Ont., and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000).
See John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. by Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xxii–xxvi.
Bradford K. Mudge relates Memoirs of a Coxcomb to this new climate, especially its changing attitudes to prostitution, in Whore’s Story, pp. 223–30.
Howard Swazey Buck provides a complete account of the revisions in A Study in Sinollett (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 123–207; they are summarized by James L. Clifford in the notes to his edition.
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© 2002 Bill Overton
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Overton, B. (2002). Adultery in Early British Fiction. In: Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1890. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286207_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286207_4
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