Regency Literature: Romance of the Forest

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In Emma, Harriet Smith recommends Romance of the Forest to Mr Martin. His failure to find and read the book is fodder for Emma’s campaign against him as a suitor.

Romance of the Forest was published in 1791, and was one of Ann Radcliffe’s staple gothic novels. It was a huge hit at the time, and so it’s natural it would have been popular with readers who enjoyed fiction.

Set in France, it follows the heroine Adeline who is pushed from a strange, ancient home into the care of a family and their servants fleeing Paris from debt. They finally end up at the ruins of an Abbey, owned by a mysterious Marquis who later captures her. What a thrilling and salacious read, especially for an impressionable young woman.

But also not surprising that a sensible farmer was not rushing out to read it.

Yet many people of sense delighted in the romanticism themes of the gothic, as a clap back to the Enlightenment:

brance does not prevent them from the per petration of new atrocities In short in the hands of Mrs Radcliffe not merely the tramp ling of a steed and the pauses of the wind but in certain circumstances even common footsteps and the shutting of a door become sublime and terrible Of the three great works of Mrs Radcliffe the Romance of the Forest which was sug gested by one of the Causes Celebres is perhaps on the whole and as a whole the most inte resting and perfect in its fable Abounding less in powerful writing than either of the others the story is more naturally conducted and is clogged with fewer improbabilities Indeed the apparently supernatural circum stances are accounted for at the end of the romance in such a manner as scarcely to the reader or to appear inadequate to the emotions of surprise and terror which had been raised in the course of the work The beginning of the romance is such as strongly to awaken interest the mysterious of La Motte the manner in which the heroine of the story is intrusted to him the romantic forest and ruined abbey in which he takes shelter his alarms for discovery the arrival of his son his visits to the awful tomb in the forest the introduction of the wicked Marquis de Montalt his deep laid plots and sudden change of conduct towards Adeline are all described in the most forcible manner We are delighted with the wild and romantic seclusion of the abbey and the spectral part of the story if I may so express myself is not exaggerated nor overcharged There is scarcely to be found in any work of fiction a more beautiful picture than that of La Luc and his family in the third volume and it shows that Mrs Radcliffe was capable of painting not merely the general features of the personages in a romance but the finer traits of character in a novel of real life Clara de Luc is the most interesting female charac ter in the volumes of Mrs Radcliffe In the
Romance of the Forest also we are less fatigued with landscapes than in the Mysteries of Udolpho or the Italian It is true that the heroine Adeline is pretty liberal of her poesy but in this case we are warned of our danger and can avoid it whereas in prose we have no previous notice and are forced to observe the purple tints and all the other tints which occur or in the course of ages may occur at sun rise or sun set lest we may unwarily pass over and lose any of the incidents Dunlop, J. T. (1825). The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Works of Fiction from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age. (n.p.): Longman Brown.

By 1794, there were stage adaptations of Radcliffe’s novel, including at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, under the title Fontainville Forest.  Advertised as a tragedy,  (Manchester Mercury – Tuesday 09 December 1794) it would still be captivating audiences into the 19th century.  Multiple editions of Radcliffe’s novels were published, sometimes in collections or in new issues (Sheffield Iris – Tuesday 09 January 1838).

The things Dunlop is focused on in his review are strikingly a part of academic analysis that focuses on aesthetic pleasure and experience, and its alignment with virtue (Lipski, J. (2018). The perils of aesthetic pleasure in Ann Radcliffe’s’ The Romance of the Forest’and’The Mysteries of Udolpho’.).  This novel choice, which I believe was deliberate on the part of Austen, is painting another young ingenue character as overly steeped in sensibility. Her pleasures are largely dumb or visceral, but Emma can appreciate this because she believes herself in the position to help mold poor Harriet.  The sensible farmer, however, is as dull as his station and therefore untouchable.

I have shared my opinion on social media that Emma is more of a coming of age story, than a romance.  As Normandin (2019) points out, Romance of the Forest is as much about Emma as it is about Harriet, however; her longstanding wish to see the sea, and her isolation from that experience,  represents such the sort of sensibility under a very fake mask of sense.  Like many Austen heroines, she is rewarded with her deepest desire when she learns the lessons, including what it really means to be a gentlewoman of privilege. McInnes (2016) further points to Jane Fairfax as a sort of gothic, frail heroine with Emma as the femme fatale, in a sort of tweak on gothic tropes. Furthermore, Emma’s imagination, like Cathy Morland’s, projects all manner of conspiracy and machinations on her very small world revealing how naive and sheltered she truly is.

As Ford (2003) points to, Mr Knightley and Mrs Weston consider the friendship of Harriet and Emma primarily in terms of encouraging Emma to read more, wanting her to broaden her understand. But Harriet’s influence makes gothic romance out of even the most mundane. This is why Ford suggests Emma could be understood, alongside Northanger Abbey, as a gothic parody.

These tensions, subtle subtext and context are what makes Jane Austen a classic writer, even if modern audiences don’t always understand the reference.

 

Ford, S. A. (2003). How to read and why: Emma’s Gothic mirrors. Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, 25, 110-121.

McInnes, A. (2016). Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen’s Emma. Gothic Studies, 18(1), 71-84.

Normandin, S. (2019). Seeing the SEA in Jane Austen’s EMMA and Ann Radcliffe’s ROMANCE OF THE FOREST. The Explicator, 77(3-4), 91-94.

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