Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, was a serious collector of books and prints in her own right. Surely the only British queen ever to have learnt how to set type, she also set an intellectual example to the ladies of the kingdom. The sale catalogue of her library, auctioned by Christie’s in June and July 1819, included over 500 lots of prints and drawings and almost 5,000 of books, organized by subject; theology alone took three-and-a-half days to clear. While it is interesting to see just what the Queen and her daughters might have been reading (in English, French, Italian and of course German) on sundry topics in religion, law and history, the student of literature is naturally drawn to the pages that list plays, poetry and novels, and in this last category it is surprising to find two titles most of us have never heard of listed under the name of Jane Austen.
The Queen had died in November 1818. Her collection included Austen’s posthumous publications, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published in December 1817 with the “biographical notice” that named Austen publicly as an author for the first time and correctly identified all her novels. Between them, then, the Queen’s librarian and Christie’s cataloguer should have known better than to add to the list the forbiddingly titled Self-Control and Discipline. But they did not. It is an intriguing error. It must signal the presence of qualities that contemporaries associated with Austen; mere carelessness would not account for the addition of these anonymously published titles to the set of her works rather than to somebody else’s. Their author was not formally identified until 1819 – too late for the sale catalogue – when her widower published Emmeline. With Some Other Pieces. By Mary Brunton, Author of Self-Control, and Discipline.
Self-Control tells the story of a fatal love affair. The irresistible Colonel Hargrave, possessed of a fortune and “the near prospect of a title”, is the favoured suitor of Laura Montreville, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a recently widowed half-pay officer. In the first chapter, he impulsively urges her to elope with him and become his mistress. But Laura, though she does love him, not only rejects the idea with horror but also refuses his honourable proposals of marriage the next morning with a sharp rebuff: “I fear, Sir, I shall not be suitably grateful for your generosity, while I recollect the alternative you would have preferred”. From this starting-point their lives and their feelings for one another diverge dramatically. Her strong-minded adherence to principle, or “self-control”, is contrasted with his surrender to wild passions. Laura is cut off from her home and friends, then loses her father. Though she finds refuge with a titled relative, her unprincipled aunt conspires with Hargrave against her. As he presses his suit more and more desperately, and as more of his past behaviour is revealed to her, Laura is increasingly estranged from him, until in the end he has her kidnapped and carried out of the country. He plans to rape and then marry her; she plans to die. At the last moment she makes her escape but Hargrave, believing that he has driven her to her death, takes his own life. Having learnt at last to distinguish between love and romantic delusion, Laura marries the worthy, steadfast, self-controlled Montague De Courcy instead, and lives happily ever after.
Addressed, like Austen’s work, to the patrons of circulating libraries, the novel betrays the literary parentage of Samuel Richardson (especially Clarissa) and Frances Burney (especially Cecilia). The author’s dedicatory notice conventionally expresses the wish to mingle instruction with pleasure, going further than usual by explicitly invoking religious values, on the model of Hannah More’s recent success Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808). Besides enjoying the legitimacy of improving entertainment when it first appeared in 1811, Self-Control offered a number of original features, among them its Scottish orientation. Though English-born, Laura’s father and her future husband both have the advantages of a Scottish education: De Courcy’s careful mother is said to have been “afraid to trust him to the temptations of an English university”. Laura herself grows up near Perth and speaks Gaelic as her first language. There are lively vignettes of life in rural Scotland and in Edinburgh, with characters who speak in dialect like their counterparts in the Irish novels of Maria Edgeworth.
When the novel first appeared it created a buzz in Edinburgh; since it was published simultaneously in London, the buzz soon spread to England. Three editions were needed in the year of publication and a fourth the year after. The reviews were mainly enthusiastic, though all noted certain flaws and one was crushingly sarcastic about its preachiness – what the reviewer called “methodistical palavering”. In her journal a lady described Byron, on the brink of fame himself, at a house party that year and dropping in and out as the other guests were being treated to a reading from Self-Control, smiling “at ‘the cant of it’ as he termed all the serious parts”. Some reviewers objected that the author ought not to hold up for admiration a woman so weak as to confess her love before she was proposed to; others thought Laura was too hard on Hargrave. But controversy was as helpful to sales as it usually is. Jane Austen, who was just at that time seeing her own first novel through the press, complained that she had been unable to lay hands on a copy. She seems to have feared being scooped by the unknown author, for Sense and Sensibility is also about self-control. When she did finally read Brunton’s book, however, she found that the work was in a different mode from her own, full of suspenseful adventures and hair’s-breadth escapes. (Even the most favourable reviews deplored the melodramatic ending, in which the heroine escapes over a waterfall somewhere near Quebec City, lashed to a birchbark canoe.) Two years later, Austen’s considered assessment, given with what sounds like a sigh of relief, was that Self-Control was “an excellently-meant, elegantly-written work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it”. Yet Austen did reread and learn from it.
Though it is indeed a formulaic tale about the adventures of a virtuous, persecuted heroine, and though it has obvious weaknesses, Self-Control is an impressive achievement, engrossing to read and less conventional than one might expect. The canvas is broad, the narrator is often witty, the characters are varied and interesting, the social criticism is astute, and Brunton does not flinch at unpleasant subjects. (One of the hostile reviews asked rhetorically whether responsible parents would want their daughters “to take up a religious novel and read of rapes”.) No one who is capable of reading Austen will have any difficulty with the style. Brunton’s Christian dogmatism is more troublesome, though we can make allowance for that as historically understandable and really rather brave. A book with such obvious moral designs on its readers had to be extra-specially exciting to overcome their resistance. Brunton foresaw that she would be accused of sanctimoniousness; she has her heroine face taunts of prudishness and spiritual pride. The next novel, Discipline, contains even more overt religion – “too much for amusement, perhaps for good taste”, as Brunton herself said, but she refused to change it.
It is probably Brunton’s faith-based moral seriousness that gives her work its most remarkable quality, its intense interiority. Packed with external incident as it is, Self-Control is mainly concerned with acts of the mind. Brunton signalled her intentions on the title-page with an epigraph from William Cowper that begins, “His warfare is within”.
The pattern in the novel established from the outset is that action leads to reflection, whence arise decisions and further action. Something happens; the mind sets to work on it. The heroine is naturally the main site of this drama of reflection. Again and again, we are made privy to the process of her thought, as for instance when she looks back on her own behaviour after Hargrave has made his initial proposals:
Satisfied of the purity of her conduct, she next proceeded to examine its prudence: but here she found little reason for self-gratulation. Her conscience, indeed, completely acquitted her of levity or forwardness, but its charge of imprudence she could not so easily parry. Why had she admitted a preference for a man whose moral character was so little known to her? Where slept her discretion, while she suffered that preference to strengthen into passion? Why had she indulged in dreams of ideal perfection? . . . These prudent reflections came, in part, too late; for to love, Laura was persuaded she must henceforth be a stranger.
Brunton excels in the representation and dramatization of thought; it occupies a large part of all her fiction. She knows how to play off a character’s awareness against that of the narrator, blending free indirect discourse with subtle authorial commentary: Laura is not destined to be henceforth a stranger to love, though for the moment she thinks she is. The result is that we know exactly what a character is thinking, as with characters in Richardson’s novels; but we understand also that the character is fallible, and that we should be alert to discrepancies between the views of the character and those of its creator.
The passages of introspection in Self-Control were, for their time, unusual in scale and range. Brunton extended the internal point of view to all the major figures and some of the minor ones, for instance Laura’s dreadful aunt, Lady Pelham, and even the shadowy gambler named Lambert who has his hooks into Hargrave. We know what they are thinking and how they think, and are obliged to a certain extent to empathize with them. The external complications of the plot, especially the growing distance between Laura and Hargrave, are by these means psychologically grounded. Readers can see trouble impending merely from the different ways in which the characters’ minds work. The plot unfolds, then, not as an episodic series of adventures but as a dynamic struggle, Laura’s efforts to disengage her heart fuelling Hargrave’s resentment and driving him to greater and greater violence, which in turn increases her determination to escape him. A thoughtless, worldly man becomes a bad one.Here is Hargrave, early on, trying to figure out how to satisfy Laura’s requirement that for two probationary years his conduct should be such as to satisfy wise, sober-minded, pious judges:
He did not game, his expenses did not much exceed his income, therefore he could imagine no change in his deportment necessary to conciliate the “wise”. Though, under the name of sociality, he indulged freely in wine, he seldom exceeded to intoxication. Here again reform seemed needless. But, that he might give no offense to the “sober-minded”, he intended to conduct his indispensable gallantries with great discretion, he determined to refrain from all approach to seduction, and magnanimously resolved to abstain from the molestation of innocent country-girls and decent maid-servants. Finally, to secure the favour of the “pious”, he forthwith made a purchase of Blair’s sermons, and resolved to be seen in church at least once every Sunday.
Hargrave means well but he hasn’t a clue. The effect is comical and serious at the same time; we can see that he is not a conscious hypocrite. We half like him and wonder whether he might not be brought round, for there is as yet no rival on the scene. While there is room for suspense, however, there is no moral ambiguity. The ironies of the passage, heavy-handed in the last few lines (and “much” in the first sentence is a give-away), all work against him.
After Self-Control, Brunton published only one more novel, but she also completed a hundred pages or so of a third. Rather than staying with a winning formula, she tried out new techniques and subjects. Though the titles might appear to be interchangeable, Self-Control is different from Discipline, in which Brunton abandoned the exemplary heroine for one who is strong and attractive but deeply flawed, the spoiled heiress Ellen Percy. (In a reversal of the usual situation, the heiress is rejected by Mr Right.) This time the story is told in the first person, ensuring the reader’s identification with the protagonist and at the same time fostering suspense, since the motivation of other characters is concealed from the narrator. A riches-to-rags plot introduces a spectrum of credible social situations, from the obligatory masquerade to an auction of poor furniture in an Edinburgh tenement. The Scottish element is expanded – though Brunton almost took it all out before the book went to the printer, when Waverley appeared (she knew Scott was the author) and she felt that her own treatment of the Highlands would be superfluous.
The unfinished novel, Emmeline, was a more daring experiment; a contemporary reviewer said it was almost too painful to read. Its protagonist, treated with great sympathy, is a divorced woman who has married her lover. Casting aside melodrama and beginning her narrative after the sensational action is over, Brunton focuses on the domestic life of the newlyweds, laying out the everyday social consequences of divorce and its even worse psychological damage. No blame is attached to any of the principals, but Emmeline has had to give up her children forever, and has been publicly humiliated. She and her second husband De Clifford have virtually no company but each other. The servants do not respect Emmeline, and since she herself is guilt-stricken, she cannot exert control over them, so the house is badly managed and tempers are frayed. Because they cannot talk about their plight, the couple misunderstand and misinterpret one another. Their shared isolation – reflected in the narrative technique which shifts between their two minds – has an increasingly corrosive effect, until at the end, according to Brunton’s draft outline, love is gone and Emmeline is left entirely alone.
Brunton and Austen were almost exact contemporaries and their novels, produced for the same readership, have more in common both superficially and at deeper levels than Austen’s brief remark about Nature and Probability might suggest. It is quite conceivable that Christie’s cataloguers could not tell them apart. Though Brunton’s stories may to a modern eye look like Austen’s with added sex and violence, a contemporary might have thought of the comparison as working the other way round: Austen’s were like Brunton’s but with less of that. Brunton was the more popular. Her books were more frequently reprinted than Austen’s, more widely reviewed, and quicker to win the tribute of American editions. For fifty years after the authors’ deaths (Austen’s in in 1817, Brunton’s in 1818), Brunton’s maintained a slight advantage in the market. But as her work faded from view, Austen’s began to be taken up first by cognoscenti and then by the school system, aided by a myth-making biography of 1870 and by a decorousness – at least on the surface – that made her fiction acceptable for all ages. Brunton appears to have lost ground less because of her didacticism than because of the adult content of her novels.
Forgotten for over a hundred years after the 1870s, Brunton’s name has not fared badly in more recent times. Austen’s dismissive reference leads the occasional reader to her; she is mentioned now and then as a Scottish writer. Her novels were revived and reprinted along with other work by neglected women writers in the 1980s, and that led to a few good chapters in academic studies. Copies are not very hard to find through libraries or second-hand bookshops; if all else fails they can be downloaded from the internet, though that is the least comfortable way of approaching them. Unfortunately, her name is invoked far more often than her work is read, and if she is discussed at all it is merely as a foil to Austen, not as a rival or complement, let alone as a writer of independent worth. Even then, her writings may get short shrift. One eminent Austen scholar dismisses Self-Control and Discipline as works whose titles speak for themselves. Can she have read them? Another calls them “dour” but they are not dour: this critic must have known that Brunton was a Scot and have supposed the worst.
I am not proposing to replace Austen with Brunton, only to spread the word about one worthwhile neglected writer. But let Mary Brunton stand for the whole class of potentially interesting non-canonical writers. Obscure but rewarding works like hers have a lot to offer non-specialist as well as specialist readers, and up to a point, the less professional attention they have had, the better. Jane Austen is at present an Eiffel Tower in the literary world – a Taj Mahal, an Empire State Building, St Paul’s Cathedral. Where is there for readers to go once they have satisfied their curiosity and established their credentials by visiting the great sites? Do they seek out other monuments and work their way through the Republic, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, the Divine Comedy? Reread their old favourites? Wait for the next movie version? Turn to historical fiction? Give up old books and try instead to keep up with the new ones? For those “general” or “serious” readers who like the psychic space of Regency Britain first encountered in Austen, it might be a pleasure to explore lesser edifices and so bit by bit to discover the great city that surrounds the monument.
Famous works come bearing a weight of expectation, commentary, controversy. They have, to transfer the tourist metaphor, a ton of baggage of their own. The obscure ones travel light. They may be unappreciated but they are by the same token unspoiled, so readers encounter them directly and if they like what they find they experience something like a revelation: that they don’t need the usual aids to enjoy an old book, and that there is a parallel literary universe out there open to the adventurous. So may serendipity, even if it should appear in the improbable form of a sale catalogue, lead readers to discover Bruntons of their own.
