Bennett Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-916821-05-7
Verlag: Honno Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 36, 600 Seiten

Reihe: Welsh Women's Classics

The first republication of this bestselling, influential novel since 1794, responding to Bennett's rising profile.Marked by the sometimes scandalous life experiences of its author, Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794) is an insightful, often humorous look at Wales, and Britain, at a time of changing social norms and attitudes. Raised in relative seclusion in Wales, where she is preyed on by a corrupt English lord, Ellen marries Lord Castle Howel, a wealthy, older man, in order to save her grandparents' ancient estate.Transplanted to London, accompanied by her indefatigable Welsh maid, Winifred, Ellen's innocence about the workings of fashionable society brings about a separation from her husband and the loss of her reputation. Following a dash to the north of England, where she gives birth to her son, she is reunited with her husband and her good name is restored.When Lord Castle Howel is killed in a riding accident, Ellen returns to Wales and sees her and her family's fortunes transformed.An informative introduction contextualizes Anna Maria Bennett's life and writings.A seminal, insightful, witty example of the Wales-related novels which were ragingly popular in the Romantic period.A humorous and dramatic lens on a changing Welsh and British society.

Believed to have been born in Merthyr Tydfil, Anna Maria Bennett (c. 1740-1808) led a sometimes scandalous life as a wife, mistress, mother of illegitimate children, theatre manager and author. Her seven novels were compared favorably to those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Frances Burney, and influenced Jane Austen's work. Perhaps as a result of her own notoriety, Bennett's novels sold incredibly well on publication but this is the first new edition of Ellen since 1794.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bennett, Anna Maria

Leseproben

Introduction

MARY CHADWICK

Anna Maria Bennett (c. 1745-1808) was one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She wrote six novels between 1785 and 1806: Anna: or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (1785), Juvenile Indiscretions (1786), Agnes de-Courci: a Domestic Tale (1789), Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794), The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797) and Vicissitudes Abroad (1806). Her first novel, Anna, sold out on the day of publication and, in 1794, Ellen saw a second edition just three months after the first. Bennett was praised highly by many reviewers including Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who described The Beggar Girl as “the best novel … since [Henry] Fielding”. She was also compared very favourably to Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, who are now part of the canon of eighteenth-century fiction, and her works were read by Jane Austen and her family, feeding into Austen’s juvenilia and the development of her own writing.

Over the last few decades Bennett has received somewhat sporadic critical and readerly attention. Feminist scholars have explored her portrayals of women’s work and socio-economic position in late eighteenth-century Britain, and researchers who consider British literary history with a focus on Wales have paid particular attention to Bennett’s two Wales-related novels, Anna and Ellen. Bennett’s works mark a transitional stage in British fiction writing. The pacing of her novels is often fast and lively. Her main characters are drawn to be largely engaging or repellent but they are rarely two-dimensional or lacking in nuance, and her supporting cast members are provided with personality and depth. Bennett’s novels reflect the canonical texts of the eighteenth century; she looks back to the tropes and motifs used by Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding, notably in her humour and satire, her comic characterisation, and her development of plots centred on orphans who navigate choppy courses through early adulthood before finding security through marriage or inheritance or both. At the same time, she foreshadows nineteenth-century novelistic developments. Her narrative voice sometimes takes on the ironic tone for which Austen would become known and her depictions of gender and class relations have been described by Miranda Burgess as a forerunner of Dickens’ social novels. Ellen is marked by literary trends such as the Gothic, by the ongoing processes of the integration of Welsh culture and people into Great Britain, by contemporary ideas about female education, and by the experiences of Bennett and her daughter as mistresses of wealthy, high profile men. Writing at a time of great personal stress, Bennett spun these themes together to create a text which, while sometimes contradictory or ambiguous, has a gripping plot, engaging characters, and a wealth of detail regarding late eighteenth-century life in a society which was marked by both tradition and transition.

The details of Bennett’s early life remain obscure. Even her name is sometimes given as Agnes, rather than Anna. She was born in Merthyr Tydfil, sometime in the 1740s (an informed guess based on the 1761 and 1781 birth dates of her daughters). Her father was probably a David Evans, who was a customs officer or a grocer or both. At some point in Bennett’s childhood the family appear to have moved to Bristol. Following her early marriage to a Mr Bennett of Brecon, who may have been a tanner or a customs officer, Bennett found her way to London where she worked in a succession of jobs including in a workhouse, a slop shop and a chandlery. It was in the chandlery that she met Sir Thomas Pye (c. 1708-1785), a wealthy and well-connected admiral of the Royal Navy. Sometime in the late 1750s or very early 1760s Bennett became Pye’s housekeeper and mistress, enjoying an improved degree of material and financial comfort. She had at least four children with Pye during their time together: Thomas, Harriet (c. 1761-1865), Nancy and Caroline (b. 1781). The couple’s relationship broke down in the 1780s, apparently in part as a result of Pye sending Bennett a letter intended for another of his mistresses. Although Pye made good on his promise to leave Bennett an inheritance of his house in Tooting, she experienced financial and emotional distress in the decades after the end of their affair. She moved between London and Edinburgh – where she briefly managed the Theatre Royal – navigating fluctuating fortunes. She died in Brighton in 1808.

Reading an author’s biography into their work can sometimes be a risky business but Ellen does seem to reflect Bennett’s experiences, and those of her daughter Harriet, as women negotiating financial and sexual relationships with little training or security. Several of Bennett’s novels, notably Anna, Ellen and The Beggar Girl, engage with the issue of women’s position in British society, with a focus on women’s economic dependence on men and the difficulties faced by those who lacked familial financial support. In Wales, Ellen is effectively sold into marriage with Lord Castle Howel in order to save her grandparents’ estate from the clutches of their grasping neighbour, John Morgan. Another financial transaction – the payment of her gambling debt by a man who is not her husband – brings about suspicions of adultery and the loss of Ellen’s good reputation in the eyes of “polite” London society, precipitating her separation from her husband and her flight to the north of England. There are distinct biographical parallels between Bennett’s childhood in Wales, her move to London and her subjection to the judgemental gaze of metropolitan society.

Letters which Bennett wrote to Pye between 1781 and 1785 chart the shift in her status from loving mistress, pregnant with baby Caroline (who was born in the winter of 1781), to financially pressed former lover. The letters are novelistic both in the events they describe and in their tone as Bennett’s distress and anger cause her writing to become more and more passionate. The intertwining of a woman’s body with her financial worth bubbles beneath the surface of Bennett’s novels and letters, becoming explicit when she describes her own heart as “Poor disappointed … honest and I will say … Valuable” (Westminster City Archives, 36/71, undated, 1785?). Pye adhered to his promise to leave Bennett a house in his will but she clearly feared poverty in his lifetime: “your will is Like to do vast things for a woman, who Living, you have obliged to take up her bed and Walk, who is sent from the ark to where no olive Branches Grow … it is more irksome than any Earthly Gratification to me to be obliged to Stand in supplant of my own subsistence” (Westminster City Archives, 36/72, undated, 1785?). The phrasing and passion apparent in the later letters resemble the dialogue Bennett wrote for the character of Winifred, Ellen’s Welsh maid.

Perhaps because Bennett felt her own lack of preparation for the world she entered, the theme of female education is particularly significant in Ellen. Raised in innocent and unsophisticated seclusion in Wales, Ellen goes to school in Bath, where she receives training in polite female accomplishments, but must then navigate the unforgiving London social scene with little understanding of its unwritten rules. The preparation of young women for the world was the subject of much discussion in the 1790s and Ellen takes its place in those debates. Some late eighteenth-century writings, notably Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), sought to reform society alongside, or through, a reformation of the ways that young women were taught. Other authors focused on the ways that the education of girls and young women might prepare them for the world as it was, and it is this latter approach which can be seen in Ellen. Moira Dearnley reads in the novel a significant element of anger on Bennett’s part regarding the position of women in British society, notably her belief that young women were rarely truly equipped to be independent of men. Bennett appears to have done her best to counteract this dependency – she trained her daughter Harriet for the stage and hoped that another daughter, Nancy, might support herself through drawing. Bennett, Harriet and her fictional heroine Ellen all entered a kind of prostitution, bartering themselves or being bartered by men in attempts to gain financial security for their families, before being forced to deal almost alone with the implications of those transactions and the results of those relationships breaking down.

The preface, or ‘Apology’, which Bennett added to the second edition of Ellen makes clear that she was suffering acute distress as she wrote the novel, as a result of legal battles which saw her lose a significant amount of money. In the early 1790s, through the influence of her lover, Douglas, 8th Duke of Hamilton (1756-99), Harriet gained the lease of the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh, in a partnership with Stephen Kemble. When Harriet returned to the London stage in the winter of 1792-3, Bennett took her place as theatre manager in Edinburgh. Hamilton appears to have pushed Kemble out of the theatre, resulting in a legal...