The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth

I had high hopes for ‘The Absentee’; my previous experience with Edgeworth was more than encouraging and the first fifty pages were very encouraging. From there on in though it went a bit downhill for me, the reason for this is that ‘The Absentee’ was originally intended as a play and it still reads like one. The dialogue wants to be declaimed and everyone is forever striding off or popping in all of which I find very unsettling.

It’s sort of a shame because it would have been a pretty decent play and could with a much more thorough overhaul have been a much better novel, which 200 years after the fact is all fairly moot and perhaps if I’d not spent such a long time anticipating I wouldn’t have felt so underwhelmed by the end.

On the plus side the story is good. Young Lord Colombre has recently graduated from Cambridge and come up to town where he finds all is not as it should be. His mother is intent on breaking into the highest circles of society despite her own and others prejudice over Irishness, the more she tries to hide it the more ridiculous she becomes and the further she falls short of her society ambitions. Colombre is both shocked and distressed to hear his mother being openly mocked by guests that the family are bankrupting themselves to entertain.

Lord Clonbrony – Colombre’s father – has fallen into low company and the hands of the money lenders (a fairly stereotypical and unpleasant portrait of a Jewish money lender features which is an ironic point of interest in a book that’s so concerned about anti Irish sentiment). He misses the status he had back in Ireland so has sought out Irish company and in doing so has taken a step down amongst the hangers on at race courses and the like.

There is also an attractive but poor young lady who’s a sort of cousin – Grace Nugent, Colombre is in love with Grace but realises that his family won’t approve and so decides the best thing he can do is take himself off to Ireland to see what the situation actually is between his happy memories and his mothers absolute hatred of the country. First impressions of his native country are good but then Colombre falls in with Lady Dashfort and her daughter who are on a man hunt. He’s temporarily diverted from his purpose as they bear him off into the country and show him all the worst they can of the place, they also break the news that Grace is most likely illegitimate.

Grace’s parentage was an unexpected plot twist, she’s a clever, attractive, and virtuous young woman extremely loyal to her family, a loyalty that the Clonbrony’s share – they are aware of her supposed parentage but value her on her own merits. Colombre seems unable to do the same, the stigma of illegitimacy is too much for him despite his love so he proposes going off to the army. All the while there is also a dissertation on the virtues of a well run estate with an honest agent against the vices of a badly run estate and a dishonest agent.

Eventually Colombre returns to London and offers to sign away a portion of his inheritance to balance the family books if and only if everyone returns to Ireland. At first lady Clonbrony resists but eventually agrees with the promise of new furniture. The question of Grace still remains and through a series of unlikely coincidences she’s found to be a legitimate heiress after which everything is set to end happily.

I couldn’t help but compare this plot with Anthony Trollope’s ‘Dr Thorne’ (written some fifty years later) there are so many similarities that Trollope could have lifted the plot straight from Edgeworth (and who knows maybe he did) but his treatment of illegitimacy is entirely different. His Mary isn’t half the woman that Grace is but she’s deemed worthy of being loved for her own merits despite her parentage which is possibly the first evidence I’ve found of the Victorians being more open minded than there Georgian predecessors.

In conclusion it’s a better book to think about than it was to read at the time, but even here I really do like Edgeworth and I’ve still got ‘Helena’ waiting.

Breeding Classics for Profit and Pleasure

I realise I’ve not talked much about an actual book recently – I have been reading but it’s been a combination of a book for a postal reading group which I think it might have been bad form to talk about it, and Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Belinda’ which I’ve been desperate to talk about, but have been slow in finishing. I’ve also been distracted by shopping and baking but might gloss over that for now.

Despite having had ‘Castle Rackrent' on the shelf for years I only read it, and finally discovered Maria Edgeworth last autumn. She was something of a revelation to me – I find it can be hit or miss with me when it comes to reading eighteenth century classics for fun, and I have no other reason to read them. ‘Belinda’ reminds me why I gravitate towards the classics in the first place.

The story is roughly as follows Belinda Portman is an orphan in (I guess) her late teens, she’s been bought up by an aunt who has successfully disposed of six previous nieces in advantageous marriages and Belinda is to be her final triumph. She’s not quite penniless but she doesn’t really have independent means either. After much manoeuvring she’s sent off to stay with Lady Delacour in town, and this is when the action begins. Belinda soon realises that not all is well with Lady D (suspected cancer, raging opium addiction, unhappy marriage) or with Lord D (alcoholic, gambling problem, dodgy mistress) still she sets out to be a good friend and does what she can to improve the domestic situation. Meanwhile she falls in love with a young man who turns out not to be all he seems (grooming a young woman to be the ideal wife in secluded Twickenham), becomes engaged to another who also turns out to be less than perfect (just gambling this time). All this without even starting on the vindictive cross dressing Harriet Freke who is determined to ruin both Belinda and Lady D, or the interesting insights into attitudes about race, or even the meditations on the courses open to middle and upper class women in the eighteenth century.

If I have a problem with the book it’s that it took me two weeks to read – it demands a little bit of concentration; more than I can give it on tea breaks – but that’s hardly a bad thing. On the plus side there are a lot of things to chew over at leisure; early on Belinda decides not to follow the examples around her and she starts to assert her independence. A risky thing for a girl in her position; throughout the book she is a guest in her friends’ homes – a precarious situation at best. Interestingly when Lady Delacour makes her will she leaves jewellery to Belinda making it clear that if she marries she can wear it, but if she chooses not to it will furnish her with an independence.

Belinda’s aunt sends her to London with this advice

“But nothing to my mind can be more miserable than the situation of a poor girl, who after spending not only the interest, but the solid capital of her small fortune in dress, and frivolous extravagance, fails in her matrimonial expectations, (as many do merely from not beginning to speculate in time). She finds herself at five or six and thirty a burden to her friends, destitute of the means of rendering herself independent (for the girls I speak of never think of learning to play cards) de trop in society, yet obliged to hang on all her acquaintance who wish her in Heaven, because she is unqualified to make the expected return of civilities, having no home...fit for the reception of company of a certain rank.”

 It’s harsh advice for a young girl, but still has a ring of truth to it more than two hundred years later. Like it or not unmarried women still lack a certain status – although thank heaven and feminism we have a few more choices these days.

Fortunately Belinda’s fate is happier than the one above. I love this book for the combination of almost sensation novel levels of action and serious issues. I have one more Edgeworth on the shelves after which I will be trawling amazon in the hopes of unearthing something good. Meanwhile I'm very pleased that Oxford World Classics are keeping Edgeworth available for people like me to discover, and  reminding me that classics are classics for a reason.