SOURCE: "The Novel as Pious Polemic," in Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrtive Patterns 1700–1739, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 211–61.

[In the following excerpt from a discussion of the novel as pious polemic, Richetti analyzes Rowe's writings and their widespread popularity.]

It is a short and logical step from creating a fictional moral centre like Galesia to having a well-known female paragon write fiction and lend it her personal cachet. This is precisely what took place in 1728 when Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe published Friendship in Death: in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living.¹

In 1723 Mrs. Aubin had dedicated her novel, The Life of Charlotta du Pont, to her 'much honoured Friend, Mrs. Rowe', of whose friendship she declared herself to be very proud.² Whether they were actually intimate friends is uncertain, but both ladies certainly agreed about the polemical purpose which fiction could be made to serve. The editor of the 1739 collected edition of Mrs. Aubin's Histories and Novels noted this similarity and drew out the image of ideological solidarity which Mrs. Aubin's dedication sought to arouse in her readers:

The Life of Charlotta du Pont she dedicates to the celebrated Mrs. Rowe, with whom she had an intimacy, as we there see, and may farther reasonably infer from the Tenor of both their Writings, for the promotion of the Cause of Religion and Virtue, and from that Affinity and Kindred of Souls, which will always make the Worthy find out one another, and create Stronger ties of Union and Friendship than those of Blood.³

More than any other female writer of the early eighteenth century, Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe was a woman whose life was as well known as her works; both were considered valuable exemplars of piety and propriety until well into the nineteenth century. Most important, she could be held up as a singular exception to the disreputable ladies who dominated the field of female literature. Like the heroines of Mrs. Aubin and Mrs. Barker, she was by definition a controversial and polemical figure.

The possibilities of her exemplary life and literary career are illustrated by a satire which appeared in 1754, The Feminiad by John Duncombe.⁴ Seventeen years after her death, Mrs. Rowe was well known enough to appear in a heroic capacity in part of Duncombe's poem. Here her saintly presence banishes the literary sins of infamous scribbling ladies, and her exalted death continues to light the way for others.

The modest Muse a veil with Pity throws
O'er Vice's friends and Virtue's female foes;
Abash'd she views the bold unblushing mien
Of modern Manley, Centlivre, and Behn;
And grieves to see One nobly born disgrace
Her modest sex, and her illustrious race.⁵
Tho' harmony thro' all their numbers flow'd,
And genuine wit its ev'ry grace bestow'd,
Nor genuine wit nor harmony excuse
The dang'rous sallies of a wanton Muse:

…..

But hark! what Nymph in Frome's embroider'd vale,
With strains seraphic swells the vernal gale?
With what sweet sounds the bord'ring forest rings?
For sportive Echo catches, as she sings,
Each falling accent, studious to prolong
The warbled notes of Rowe's ecstatic song.
Old Avon pleas'd his reedy forehead rears,
And polish'd Orrery delighted hears.
See with what transport she resigns her breath
Snatched by a sudden, but a wish'd for, death!
Releas'd from earth, with smiles she soars on high
Amidst her kindred spirits of the sky,
Where Faith and Love those endless joys bestow,
That warm'd her lays, and fill'd her hopes below.⁶

In a similar fashion, Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753)⁷ includes a substantial account of her life and points out the relevance of her works and her personality to contemporary affairs:

The conduct and behaviour of Mrs. Rowe might put some of the present race of females to the blush, who rake the town for infamous adventures to amuse the public.⁸ Their works will soon be forgotten, and their memories when dead, will not be deemed exceeding precious; but the works of Mrs. Rowe can never perish, while exalted piety and genuine goodness have any existence in the world. Her memory will be ever honoured, and her name dear to latest posterity.⁹

As prophetic passages, these fail to impress, since Mrs. Rowe has long since passed into the darkest corners and remotest footnotes of literary histories; but as a reflection of eighteenth-century opinion, the sentiments are not at all extravagant.

Mrs. Rowe moved in her youth in pious but elegant dissenting circles, where her friends included the celebrated Bishop Ken and Isaac Watts. After the death of her husband, she retired to Frome in Somerset, but maintained an extensive correspondence, especially with her life-long friend, Frances Thynne, Countess of Hertford and later Duchess of Somerset. She also wrote poetry, and besides a verse retelling of 'The History of Joseph' and various other sacred pieces, produced an 'Elegy' on the death of her husband which Pope so admired that he printed it as an appendix to the 1720 second edition of Eloisa to Abelard.

After her death in 1737 her private meditations and prayers were edited by Isaac Watts, and under the title Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy remained an enormously popular work which was reprinted until the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Her biography was no less a popular commodity than her posthumous works. Her obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine called her the 'Ornament of her Sex and the Honour of the County of Somerset', and the same issue contained an anonymous verse tribute, 'On the Death of the Celebrated Mrs. Rowe'.¹¹ Other memorial poems continued to appear in the Gentleman's Magazine, and the 1739 edition of her unpublished poems and letters, Miscellaneous Works,¹² was prefaced by an impressive gathering of dedicatory poems, most written in her honour while she was alive by, among others, Isaac Watts, Elizabeth Carter, and Thomas Amory.¹³ In May 1739 the Gentleman's Magazine began a three-part life of 'the excellent Mrs. Rowe, that Ornament of her Sex, on whom we daily receive Encomiums in Verse'.

But Mrs. Rowe was most remembered for Friendship in Death, published in 1728 with part i of Letters Moral and Entertaining, which were continued with part ii in 1731 and part iii in 1732. It was a work which was widely read and apparently highly regarded.¹⁴ It seems to have become a standard minor work whose devotional uses were widely recognized, a book likely to be found in small home libraries of essential and edifying books.¹⁵

Dr. Johnson, for example, recognized that Mrs. Rowe's works were a touchstone for those who aspired to combine devotion with literary pleasure. In a review of Miscellanies in prose and verse, published by Elizabeth Harrison, which he wrote for The Literary Magazine or Universal Review in 1756, Johnson noted that the authors of the prose essays in this collection were to be praised because they had tried to imitate 'the copiousness and luxuriance of Mrs. Rowe', and to achieve something of 'her purity of sentiments'. Mrs. Rowe, he added, was the writer who had best managed 'to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion'.¹⁶

Boswell, years later in 1781, cited Mrs. Rowe's Letters in one of the essays he contributed to the London Magazine. One grows fondest of children, he writes, when they are about three years old, and one suffers most if they happen to die at that age. There is, he says casually, 'something of a peculiar pleasing fanciful consolation in the letter from a child of two years old in Heaven to its disconsolate surviving mother, in Mrs. Rowe's Letters from the Dead to the Living'.¹⁷

Johnson's and Boswell's comments are evidence of a solid, albeit minor, reputation. The name of Mrs. Rowe was one which the educated reader could be expected to recognize; her works, especially the Letters from the Dead to the Living, were part of normal literary experience. In fact, among the various scribbling ladies who contributed to the mass of prose fiction which precedes the florescence of the novel in Richardson and Fielding, Mrs. Rowe was probably the most highly respected and remembered during the eighteenth century itself.

It is hard to understand why. Her most popular work is a deadening book, written in ecstatic and inflated prose and full of the most explicit and tedious moralizing about the pains of a life of sin and the comforts of living virtuously. Its situations and characters are mechanical and verbose, and strike any modern reader as almost comically unreal. There is none of the erotic sensationalism that we have observed made the love novella so attractive, or any of the bizarre complications and exotic dangers that Mrs. Aubin relied upon to sell her books. Worst of all for us, perhaps, Mrs. Rowe's book reeks of what must be called morbidity about death, which we are reminded on every page is always menacing us and can never for a moment be lost sight of.

Yet eighteenth-century readers were quite willing to overlook these 'faults', and no one felt compelled to condemn its attitudes towards life and death as distortions of reality. To understand and to account for the respect with which a work like Mrs. Rowe's Letters was treated, we must examine it for the values which many of her contemporaries found in it.

Those values were primarily devotional and polemical, for the Letters was an aggressively didactic work. Mrs. Rowe hopes, she declares in her preface, to convince her readers through her stories of the immortality of the soul, not by rational or discursive means, but by making 'the Mind familiar, with the Thoughts of our Future Existence, and contract, as it were, unawares, an Habitual Persuasion of it, by Writings built on that Foundation, and addressed to the Affections and imagination' (sig. A3^v). The need for such aids to belief is clear, she notes, for the notion of the soul's immortality is an idea 'without which, all Virtue and Religion, with their Temporal and Eternal good Consequences, must fall to the Ground' (sig. A3^r).

Here the polemical edges are noticeable, for one did not in the early eighteenth century speak in the abstract atmosphere of speculative controversy when asserting the immortality of the soul. Neither a universally assumed article of faith nor an imponderable theological theory, it was, as Mrs. Rowe's apocalyptic clause makes clear, a highly emotional question, the answer to which put one on either side of a struggle. Mrs. Rowe, like so many other seriously committed Christians of her day, saw the times as perilous for true believers, who were attacked on every side by the mobilized forces of irreligion and infidelity.

Mrs. Rowe's preface declares an intention that is not simply didactic in the ordinary sense; it is apparent that her interest is not merely to warn the unruly heart or undisciplined emotions that they must listen to the voice of conventional morality. Even more authoritatively than Mrs. Aubin, Mrs. Rowe speaks unashamedly like a propagandist for the cause of virtue and religion. Her book is, in fact, an extremely self-conscious polemic which is armed for ideological battle with what she conceives of as a very palpable and menacing enemy. That enemy cannot be isolated or named very precisely, but he is no less real and all the more dangerous for being so shadowy, so subtly pervasive.

Mrs. Rowe concludes her preface by insisting, again like Mrs. Aubin, that her work is much more than amusement. It is in its end, she claims, totally unlike ordinary amusement, 'for which the World makes by far the largest Demand, and which generally speaking, is nothing but an Art of forgetting that Immortality, the firm Belief, and advantageous Contemplation of which, this Amusement would recommend' (sig. A3^v).

It is clear, then, that Mrs. Rowe is out to use the profane instruments of a burgeoning literary genre for sacred purposes, in Dr. Johnson's words, 'to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion'. Yet 'religion', in this case, means a transfiguration of death by an affirmation of personal immortality, and 'romance' equals the conventional intrigues of the amatory novella. In Mrs. Rowe's fervid little stories death is defeated, but only by those who are capable of love which is true and pure and always conjugal, at least in intent. Her crude and explicit exploitation of the clichés of the popular novellas and scandalous memoirs of the day is nothing less than a sign of the crucial transformation of fiction which takes place during the first four decades of the eighteenth century: the aimless if graceful literature of love which floods into England from France and Spain during the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century is subtly changed by the ideological climate, and in English Protestant hands responds to the pressure of the times to become fiction which is essentially a dramatization of the plight of an embattled and self-consciously 'virtuous' individual in a hostile and innately vicious world. It is primarily from this dialectical opposition between religion and infidelity, between the lonely virtue and implicit faith of the hero and the common corruption and cynical disbelief of the rest of the world (a simplification, of course, but fiction is by its nature concerned with ideological paradigms and not with the complexities of history) that the English novel derives the ideological matrix in which Richardson's Clarissa, for example, may be said to achieve a heroism close to sainthood.¹⁸

Mrs. Rowe evokes a 'scene' in her stories where the values of the antagonists (infidelity in religion and in love) stand in vital antithesis to those of her protagonists (belief in immortality and in conjugal love). It is to this key opposition (an agon really) that eighteenth-century readers responded, and the value of Mrs. Rowe is that she expresses the emotional elements of this conflict with crude clarity.

The first part of the Letters, Friendship in Death, consists of twenty separate novellas, told indirectly in letters from visiting spirits to persons who are still living. Most of the Letters Moral and Entertaining are written by the living to the living but deal with the same stock situations.

In Friendship in Death, each correspondent makes, as would be expected, a special point of his celestial situation. These are very serious-minded ghosts and their task is never to frighten but to dispel all doubts about the existence of the spirit world, for each one knows that the person he writes to will be surprised or terrified to find such certain proof of personal immortality. Most earnest eighteenth-century Christians would have taken (or at least wanted to take) a fictional situation like this very much more seriously than we perhaps would; the Cock-Lane Ghost is only one instance of the lingering and almost desperate hope of an age more and more dominated by scientific positivism for palpable proof of the old mysteries.

We note as well that the correspondent always describes the afterlife in pastoral terms, and we read of the usual enamelled vales and bowers of pastoral poetry. Heaven is not seen as a great urban cluster of the just; the celestial city, the New Jerusalem, has been exchanged for polemical purposes for the pastoral seats of glory. The town, which in the conventional fictional situation might be an exciting and certainly interesting place, is now the entire lower world of mortality, which is always seen by these epistolary spirits as a place well worth leaving. Indeed, one of their purposes in writing is to warn the friend or beloved of dangers of various sorts which are endemic to the seats of men. Throughout all of the Letters, in fact, this denunciation of the world is the most obtrusive concern of the plots. And so the various harried heroines and sighing heroes retreat to the country.

This rural retreat can be a number of things. It can be a place where real spiritual tranquillity is to be found for the more philosophic of Mrs. Rowe's correspondents. The eighteenth-century version of the holy hermit, the man of the world turned contemplative whom we meet so often in Mrs. Aubin's novels, appears in Letters Moral and Entertaining in the presence of Philander, an ex-'Statesman'. He has left his place in the world, he writes to a nameless 'Lord' (a friend who, we gather, is still very much a part of the world) to tell him how he has found new faith in immortality through isolation:

… abstract from business or diversion, my mind retires, within itself, where it finds treasures 'till now undiscover'd, capacities form'd for infinite objects, desires that stretch themselves beyond the limits of this wide creation, in search of the great original of life and pleasure: I find new powers exerting their energy, some latent exercises, which 'till now, I have been a stranger to. I have, indeed, heard from the men, who teach such holy fables, (as I then thought them,) that the soul was immortal, and capable of celestial joys: But I rather wish'd, than believ'd these transporting truths, and put them on a level with the poet's rosy bowers, their myrtle shades, and soft Elysian fields; but now I am convinced of their evidence, and triumph in the privileges of my own being. I rejoice to think that the moment I begun [sic] to exist, I enter'd on an eternal state, and commenc'd a duration, that shall run parallel, to that of the supreme and self-existent mind. (i. 58–9)

Philander knows that his titled friend will smile at such sentiments, but Philander has scaled, we are told, both amatory and political heights and has found only boredom and disgust at their end.

Unlike Philander, Cleora still lives in the town. She is replying to a series of eight letters in which a friend has advised her to seclude herself from the world, but she answers that she is reluctant to leave it because she is still not quite convinced about the certain existence of the next world and its joys. She feels 'a sort of reluctance to part with everything below, and a dread to enter on those unknown regions, from whence none return, to tell us what they find' (i. 106). Retirement, in other words, is tantamount to translation to a sphere of faith and beatitude to which Cleora does not feel qualified to aspire.

The country retreat is also, as commonly in the amatory novella, a haven for victims of illicit passion. Sylvia has fled to retirement in the country because of a guilty passion for a French count, the husband of a friend she has visited for a time; and it is only in this retreat that she can 'sometimes read the Bible, in contempt of all modern refinements'. It is only in the country, she declares, that she can be free 'from the tumultuous effects of a guilty passion', only there that the proper perspective can be achieved:

I am now reconcil'd to myself, and find an ineffable satisfaction in the silent approbation of my own conduct; a satisfaction superior to all the empty applause of the crowd. I reflect with pleasure on the happy change. My soul seems now in its proper situation, and conscious of its dignity, looks above this world for its rest and happiness: I am almost in a state of insensibility, with regard to mortal things, and have fixed my views on those infinite delights, which will be the certain rewards of virtue, (i. 21)

Amoret has likewise overcome 'her criminal passion' for Sebastian by retiring to the country. Sebastian, unlike Sylvia's blameless count, is a practiced seducer right out of the lurid novella who has technically 'ruined' Amoret, and the horror of this sinful moment is only banished, she declares, by the total seclusion of 'some unfrequented shade, where the images of vanity and sin may never enter!' (i. 29).

Throughout these reports from the country one sees a constant awareness of the opposing point of view which is ever ready to mock or condemn seclusion and its pretensions to beatitude. The relationship is a dialectical one; the country sustains itself as a moral position by virtue of its unremitting opposition to the values of the social and urban world. This is quite explicit in Celadon's complaint to the treacherous Amasia, 'who had seduced him into criminal love for her'.

Curse on the maxims of the world, and that impropriety of language, that would disguise the basest of crimes, with the names of amusement and gallantry! Let me be singular, let me be unpolite, let me be unfashionably good, if I can but keep my peace, and justify myself to my own conscience! Let me inviolably observe the rules of truth and justice, be fearless and open to the inspection of God, and may everlasting reproach rest, on all the modish appellations and refinements, that would soften the horror of a base and treacherous action! (i. 54)

The perfidious Amasia is the bride of Celadon's friend, Altamont who has instructed and confirmed him in these very admirable principles. Celadon's remorse turns into a near-fatal fever and the effects of this are aggravated by Altamont's constant compassion for him. Here, then, is the common love triangle so dear to Restoration comedy and so much a part, either for comic or tragic purposes, of what we can call 'aristocratic' literature. But Antony renounces Cleopatra in this case; Celadon recovers from his fever and resolves to exile himself to expiate his crimes. The conventional love rivalry has been turned primarily into a denunciation of the system of values which could find something to laugh at or to admire in an adulterous situation.

The intent here, as it is throughout Mrs. Rowe's work, is not to produce plausible character or dramatic situation. In fact, little or no attempt is made to lay the fictional groundwork, as it were, for the presentation of these elements. Mrs. Rowe uses a kind of shorthand which enables her to refer her readers to the familiar conventional fictional situation, and then to beat the moral implications out of it, to make them see the twistings of the love intrigue sub specie aeternitatis. You have read this story many times before in the course of being merely amused, she says to her readers, now here is what it really means to you.

This shift in emphasis, this deliberate exploitation of fictional material at hand, is obvious, for example, in the fairly long account of Rosalinda in parts ii and iii of Letters Moral and Entertaining. She has run away from her tyrannical and bigoted father after he has attempted to force her into marriage with someone who was both a foreigner and a papist. We hear almost nothing of the events which lead up to the crime, but at length about the moral dilemma which Rosalinda faces in running away: 'I was their only child, carefully instructed in those sacred Truths, which by the assistance of Heaven I will never renounce, but rather give up my title to all the dazzling advantages the world can tempt me with' (ii. 2). She is justified, in other words, because her father has switched his allegiance to the 'world'. She becomes, incognito, an upper servant for a country family and revels in bucolic simplicity:

I have entirely put off the fine lady, and all my court airs; I have almost forgot I am an Earl's daughter, and should start at the name of Lady Frances; Instead of that, I am plain Rosalinda, without any other appellation, but what the gentle swains now and then give me, of a handsome lass, or a proper damsel; with which I am infinitely better pleased, than when I was an angel, or a goddess, and impiously addressed in the strains of adoration, (ii. 5–6)

Rosalinda stands firm in her choice, even when her correspondent tells her that her father will now leave his entire fortune to a monastery. She draws the moral lines of the situation with unflinching righteousness, and we are intended once again to be aware of a very real struggle between opposing ways of life. 'This was what I expected; and I am sure you will not persuade me to renounce Heaven, and damn myself, for the sordid purchase of eighty thousand pounds; nor would you considerately advise me, to hazard a celestial advancement for a gilded coronet, or prefer the flattery of mistaken mortals to the approbation of Angels' (ii. 15).

It is, of course, the constant awareness of such moral issues in social and usually financial situations which is to make Clarissa possible. Marriage, Mrs. Rowe reminds us frequently, is more than a social or financial act; it is the decisive moral act of the individual's earthly career. There is a direct relationship between the desire and capacity to love purely (and of course such a love always has marriage as its goal) and salvation. This love is typically to be found outside of the 'world', sometimes, if tragedy intervenes, only beyond the grave. Rosalinda is lucky, finds and marries in the country a suitor who is of noble birth, but, more important, one distinguished by nature 'with an air of grandeur, beyond all the borrowed lustre of titles or equipage' (iii. 132).

The point that real love is only to be found by retiring both from the cities of men and the values of the world is made again in six letters from Laura, a town belle now in the country, where she has been brought by her brother. His interest in the country is, however, of a highly improper sort, for he has retired in order to dally without scandal with his new mistress, a ruined tradesman's daughter whom he has seduced. Laura's brother is a self-declared 'infidel' who has converted her to this way of thinking. But rural solitude destroys false peace of mind.

Death, that ghastly phantom, perpetually intrudes on my solitude, and in some doleful knell from a neighbouring steeple, often calls upon me to ruminate on coffins and funerals, graves and gloomy sepulchres: These dismal subjects put me in the vapours, and make me start at my shadow; nor have I acquired any degree of fortitude by turning freethinker…. (iii. 226)

Laura grows gradually accustomed to country solitude, but finds religious faith only with the aid of love, in the person of Philocles, a youthful neighbour. This pious youth responds to Laura's advances not as she expected with 'gallant and modish' raillery but with talk of 'the satisfactions of virtue, the tranquillity of the mind in the rectitude of its passions'. He has received a supernatural premonition of his imminent death, a notion that Laura cannot forbear laughing at. Philocles then admits that her beauty has made him break his vow to avoid the 'distracting passion' of love, and he confesses that his love and the knowledge of his death make her 'infidelity' doubly distressing to him. He promises, to the accompaniment of her mocking raillery, to visit her from the spirit world in order to prove his love and save her from unbelief. He dies soon after and, as good as his word, appears in a pastoral spot to the grieving Laura, who then writes to a friend of her reactions after this meeting.

This momentary view of celestial beauty has obscured all earthly glory: Never will the sun disclose a scene of pleasure to my sight; the vanities which lately amused me, have lost their charms; my thoughts are fixed on superior objects, a divine and immortal ardor inspires my soul, and determines all its motions: With the evidence I now have of a future existence, my notions of happiness are refined and enlarged, my hopes bright and unlimited. (iii. 251)

The love story has been lost in the conversion of Laura, for love is really a means of conversion. 'True love', not the carnal and sordid affairs of the godless, like Laura's brother, is something which can only convince us of the immortality of the soul. Philocles is the apotheosis of the lover who will provide religious certainty through his love; under normal circumstances he (much more often 'she') will not die and reappear in angelic light, but Mrs. Rowe does not want her point lost. She is making the normally implicit crudely explicit. This explicitness is as much a result of her polemical motives as it is of her artistic ineptitude. Love must be redefined, saved from the cynicism of the libertin, and made much more than the useful pro creative urge that the philosopher calls it.

But love, Mrs. Rowe realizes, can be a dangerous and violent force as well. When love is not possible within the legal framework of marriage, it must be rejected. Illicit love leads, however, not merely to social difficulties but to 'existential' terrors. Such is the lesson to be learned from the story of Amasia, who has allowed herself to be seduced by the rich and married Philario, in spite of the promise she made to her dying mother to have nothing to do with him. Amasia, now remorseful but still mad with love, describes her situation as she raves in a fatal fever:

This truth sits heavy on my soul, and brings my guilt with its full aggravation in view: my mother's dying admonitions, my broken vows terrify me to distraction. My crime was not the effects of ignorance and inadvertency; pitying angels set the penalties of eternal damnation, and the recompense of an immortal crown, in prospect before me; the caverns of death disclos'd their terrors, and the realms of celestial light open'd their glories to my active imagination: I was forewarn'd by the advice of a dying parent of the infamy and ruin to which this soft temptation betray'd me: I had experienc'd the satisfactions of reason and virtue. But for you I ventur'd on present and future perdition, and gave up my title to all the joys of immortality; and now, ye regions of divine delight, you have no attractions for a mind so impure, I would only fly to you, as a retreat from infernal Misery. (i. 5)

Love of this sort is real and certainly tragic, but, says Mrs. Rowe, it must not be thought of as thrillingly romantic (that is, as the erotic-pathetic fantasy which the love novella constantly resolves itself into). She asks us, rather, to view this tragic love in the light of death and eternity. The very turbulence of such passion is not the sign of inner virtue that the novella implicitly makes of it, but merely the result of the moral and psychological insecurity it brings.

If it is legal or platonic, we must remember, love can be the way to secure faith. Herminius, for example, declares that his love for the married Cleora has saved him from the very libertinism which led him to attempt her. Her modesty and piety have converted him thoroughly and made him 'a proselyte to virtue' (i. 42).

Lysander, too, has led a thoroughly dissolute life, He has just been seduced by his valet de chambre, 'Palanty', who had disguised herself as a man and served him because of desperate love. But Lysander is now directed into a marriage with a virtuous and respectable young lady, Cimene. This is the first time Lysander has loved legally and he is properly overwhelmed by the difference between lust and sanctified love: 'Till now I never knew the force of love, nor any of the refined sentiments that noble passion inspired. In what guiltless joys did the hours pass that I spent with my loved Cimene!' (ii. 56–7).

The jealous and pregnant 'Palanty' takes poison and dies; Lysander grieves but marries Cimene. He is, however, plagued by remorse for his past excesses and especially for his part in Palanty's death. But suddenly we discover that Palanty has appeared to him and left a letter in which she warns him to reform, for 'hell is no poetick fiction, no enthusiastick dream, nor pious fable of some mercenary priest' (ii. 61). This is the jargon of the opposing side; here are the cant phrases of infidelity triumphantly rejected.

Lysander, needless to say, is completely converted by such a demonstration. Once again, the conventional fictional triangle has yielded excellent polemical results. The willing reader has experienced the disastrous effects of illegal passion in the fate of Palanty, whose transvestite trick is potentially a very engaging one, and is indeed a frequent contrivance of the novella. Mrs. Rowe consistently deflates the romantic capability of such situations, and here the chain of events is designed to degrade the illegal and desperate connection Palanty seeks and to exalt the conventional marriage Lysander eventually enters. True and legal love of this sort prefigures paradise, but to experience illegal lust and the remorse which must, in Mrs. Rowe's fictional world at least, accompany it is to learn about hell. This is usually only a psychological or at least a social equivalent of hell, but Mrs. Rowe insists once again upon adding a real visitor from the infernal regions to make the connection explicit.

It is to bring confirmation of eternal fire that Eusebius writes to his son to urge him to break off an adulterous connection and to recall the challenge he has just sent to a friend who has given him the same advice. But Eusebius's ghostly warning is really a denunciation of a whole way of life, for death in a duel means only one thing:

… you will mingle with a Society that make very different Judgments of Things, from what pass for Maxims of Honour among Mortals. You will appear with a very ill Grace, and on most impertinent Occasion, among the Spirits of Darkness, to whom you will be an eternal Object of Derision. The boasted Beauty and Charms of your Mistress, will be but a poor Excuse for your Gallantry, tho' you should tell them in Heroics, how the world has been lost for a woman. (p. 63)

The last phrase, in Mrs. Rowe's italics, is a heavy allusion to an opposing ethos. Mrs. Rowe's book is part of a pervasive eighteenth-century protest against the 'senseless' maxims of aristocratic honour and against the cult of amatory gloire implicit in the traditional literature of love. It is a protest whose roots can be called 'modern-rationalistic', or, since there is a strong social mythology at work, 'practical-bourgeois'. The amatory novella generally locates itself in a world of aristocratic splendour and leisure, although avarice and lust lurk immediately under the shining surface. Shocked but delighted, the reader observes a world where love can assume an extravagant intensity denied to it in real life; there, heroes and heroines frequently lose themselves, if not the world, for love. Mrs. Rowe, in her single-minded way, will have none of the ideological equivocation of the novella and shows us nothing but the eternal consequences of such behaviour.

In Mrs. Rowe's relentlessly pious perspective, love of the proper sort functions as a preparation for death rather than as one of the traditional distractions of the flesh. We see throughout the Letters that love is the main part of man's natural resources for defeating death and making human life really possible. This point is made specifically and repeatedly in the most famous part of the Letters, Friendship in Death. There Mrs. Rowe makes the buried analogy between love and paradisal bliss explicit, rescuing it from its status as merely part of the conventionally blasphemous rhetoric of love.

In Friendship and Death we read of the harrowing death beds of several dissipated libertines, for sexual licence is a necessary corollary of religious infidelity. The dead Cleander, for example, writes to his brother to describe the death of 'the unhappy Carlos'. Carlos dies raving in the throes of uncertainty about the afterlife, and 'never did mortal give up his life in a manner more cowardly and inconsistent'. Carlos's behaviour towards one of those at his bedside is worth noting:

The abandon'd Amoret, who had followed him in the Disguise of a Page; was seldom permitted to see him; and whenever she approach'd him, he trembled, and fell into the greatest Agonies, closed his Eyes, or turn'd them from her, but spoke nothing to support her in the Distress he had brought on her, nor express'd the least Remorse for having seduced her to leave the noble Sebastian, to whom she was engaged by Marriage Vows, and a thousand tender Obligations. (p. 44)

Remorse for such offences is the first step to faith; remorse will lead to real love and real love can only flourish in faith. Mrs. Rowe's logic is circular; the lover is by definition a believer in the immortality of the soul, for the joys of love, we are shown, prefigure the joys of immortality.

Thus Altamont, a 'gentleman who died at Constantinople', describes his death with perfect calm. He simply wandered off 'when the destined hour drew near', lay down on a flowery bank and fell asleep with the voice of his dead beloved, Almeria, echoing softly in his dreams. He awakens painlessly in paradise and is met by Almeria.

… but how Dazling! how divinely Fair! Extasy was in her Eyes, and inexpressible Pleasure in every Smile! her Mien and Aspect more soft and propitious than ever was feign'd by Poets of their Goddess of Beauty and Love: What was airy Fiction there, was here all transporting Reality. With an inimitable Grace she received me into her aetherial Chariot, which was sparkling Saphire studded with Gold. (p. 7)

Death is no terrible event for lovers such as Altamont but a gentle sigh which unites them with their beloveds. This taming of death is one of the main tasks of Mrs. Rowe's Letters; departed spirits continually insist that death is an easy and joyful transition. But once again, the ease and joy of the passage are the result of an emotional association between 'pure love' and the certain joys of the afterlife.

One spirit, Clerimont, is even disappointed when his beloved Sylvia recovers from what appeared to be a fatal illness. Not only, he adds, would death have brought infinite happiness, it would have brought release from the importunities of Cassander. He is a suitor who, as Clerimont reveals, already has a wife, a 'young and beautiful Italian' (p. 41), stolen from her parents and left abandoned and ruined in a nunnery.

These are the materials of the novella and Mrs. Rowe's panegyric on death is carefully contained within the conventional tragic turns of the love tale, what I have called the fable of persecuted innocence. The dead letter writers have often themselves died of tragic or frustrated love. The novella chose to stop there, having made its erotic and pathetic points. But Mrs. Rowe is exploiting the conventional plots to make her point about the immortality of the soul, and her strategy is to make earthly love merely a prelude (although a highly significant and revealing one) to eternal celestial domesticity.

Delia, for example, tells Emilia of her entry into a pastoral paradise where she meets Emilia's brother, whom she had loved in life. 'That tender, innocent Passion I had long conceiv'd for him, kindled at the first Interview, and has taken eternal possession of my Soul' (p. 24). Amintor, who has been killed by pirates, writes to his wife, who has been captured by slave traders and is now living as a concubine in the harem of an 'illustrious bassa'. He has treated her with unusual gentleness so far and has not yet forced his oriental desires upon her. Amintor writes to tell her that all shall be well some day; for when she dies 'we shall meet to part no more; which Circumstance, though you through your Partiality for me may too highly value, believe me, you will find it by much the smallest Blessing of this Place' (p. 29). Thus love provides a transition from one world to the next; it guarantees that we have lived a proper life and it gives us a reason for wanting to leave this world, since the afterlife is best imagined as a glorified and intensified version of the joys of lovers.

Death, finally, is robbed of all its terrors by faith, and this faith, Mrs. Rowe makes clear, rests upon a belief in the power of love. Human affections, she wishes to convince us, can be so powerful that their dissolution must seem unthinkable. Such feelings are not merely pleasant delusions, they are intimations of immortality.

Mrs. Rowe's famous little book, then, is a literary polemic against unbelief, waged on the emotional and human level, for assurance of immortality and salvation is provided ultimately through conjugal love (or the capacity for it), which is elevated to the status of beatitude. Death, the great problem which rationalism and infidelity cannot solve, is defeated by true and pure love, the great human necessity which reason cannot explain or eliminate. In drawing up her polemic, Mrs. Rowe was simply purging the novella of its erotic grossness and by virtue of her shift in perspective on its themes extracting the resonances and associations it naturally contained.

The amatory novella, as we have seen, no matter how scandalous or lubricious, uses spiritual analogies and quasi-blasphemous hyperbole as its characteristic rhetorical strategy. Dissecting the works of Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Haywood, and their lesser contemporaries has shown how important this rhetoric is for creating and maintaining that ideological alignment of reader and heroine which formed the basis of their popularity. The moral polarities upon which the mythology of love rests are well served by this traditional rhetoric; and the true lovers with whom we readers melt and suffer are those initiates, as it were, who perceive the validity of these analogies and are capable of experiencing love at a pitch and intensity which makes them more than figures of speech.

It has already been observed at length, moreover, that lovers are opposed in general by a world of financial and sexual materialism which reduces love to a biological impulse and marriage to a profitable alliance. Specifically, the heroic maiden is confronted by libertin-seducers who treat love and marriage-for-love as mere chimeras and reject them in the materialistic jargon of infidelity and irreligion. Concerned as we are with audience effect, we can see how important the associations suggested by the rhetoric of love are: they place the reader on the side of the angels in what many in the eighteenth century apparently saw as an ultimate struggle for the world—the battle between religion and the massed and threatening forces of infidelity and atheism.

But pains have been taken to show how this 'spirituality' of the persecuted maiden and her occasional allies is often simply part of the massive apparatus for making her story a more efficient fantasy machine. In the capable hands of Mrs. Haywood, for example, this spirituality is not only a value with which we identify but a source of energy which impels the heroine through a whole series of erotic and pathetic scenes. She loves compulsively and often tragically, drawn to a married man or a libertine whose morals she may despise rationally. But the logic of the supervising mythology of love makes that self-destructive desire in itself a sign of authentic spirituality, tragic and destructive only because of the corrupt world which surrounds it. It suits the successful amatory narrative's purposes to identify spirituality with this irrational and totally spontaneous erotic impulse which it calls love. Only rarely do we pass from this implicit spirituality-cum-sensuality of compulsive desire to a more orthodox and less fervid spirituality through which the prevailing corrupt world can be defeated or transcended.

The connection between the persecuted maiden's struggle against the vicious world and the clash between religion and amoral secularism is, however, fully exploited in varying ways by the lady novelists we have just discussed. Together they form an important and often deliberate counter-tendency to the tradition established by Mrs. Behn and continued, notably, by Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood.¹⁹ The value of these pious narratives for us is that they provide access to a deliberate working out of the implications which are behind the great popularity of the story of persecuted innocence during the early eighteenth century.

The novel develops in its main direction (that is, as a powerful moral and social force) by learning to embody in a moving and convincing form the ideological antithesis between the faithless world and the simple and heroic believer. Mrs. Rowe's Letters, Mrs. Aubin's novels, and the short stories of Mrs. Barker are nothing less than important symptoms of the gradual accommodation of fiction to the ideological needs of the time.

Notes

¹ All citations in the text are to the 1733 'third edition', which is divided into three separately paginated parts: Friendship in Death, pp. 1–70; Letters Moral and Entertaining, part i, pp. 1–138; and parts ii and iii, pp. 1–253. References to Friendship in Death are expressed simply in Arabic numerals, while references to Letters Moral and Entertaining use Roman numerals to identify the part in question. The entire work is hereafter referred to as Letters.

²A Collection of Entertaining Histories and Novels. Design 'd to Promote the Cause of Virtue and Honour. Principally founded on Facts, and interspersed with a Variety of beautiful Incidents. By Mrs. Penelope Aubin and now first Collected. In Three Volumes (London, 1739), III. iii.

³ i, sig. A2^r.

⁴ Duncombe (1729–86) was a miscellaneous writer and clergyman.

⁵ Robert Halsband identifies this as a reference to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. See The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York, Galaxy paper-back edition, 1960), p. 255.

⁶ 11. 139–48, 151–64. Duncombe adds a note to the names of his dissolute trio, 'Manley, Centlivre, and Behn', explaining the nature of their indecencies: 'The first of these wrote the scandalous memoirs call'd Atlantis [sic], and the other two are notorious for the indecency of their plays.' Mrs. Rowe, on the other hand, needs no gloss: 'The character of Mrs. Rowe and her writings is too well known to be dwelt on here.' This description of current literary popularity may have been influenced by Duncombe's obvious preferences, but if he thought that his heroine was going unread, he would likely have included a short hit at popular taste. We notice as well that Mrs. Rowe's name is specifically linked with dying well and with joyous and certain existence after death. She appears thus in many references and was something of a culture heroine in this respect.

⁷ This collection of brief biographies was only nominally by Cibber, most of the work being done by Robert Shiels and others. The life of Mrs. Rowe included in this compendium was mostly plagiarized from the 'official' biography prefixed to the 1739 edition of her Miscellaneous Works. According to the editor of these, Theophilus Rowe, the first twenty-nine pages of this biography were written by Henry Grove, a friend of Mrs. Rowe and her husband. His sudden death, the editor informs us, made it necessary for him to continue it. This life was widely plagiarized right down to the nineteenth century in various biographical compendia. The passage cited here is not in the original Grove-Rowe biography.

⁸ This is probably a reference to scandalous memoirs such as that published in 1748 by Teresia Constantia Phillips, An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips; and the notorious Memoirs of a Lady of Quality of Lady Vane published in 1751 in Smollett's Peregrine Pickle.

⁹ London, iv. 340.

¹⁰ A 'ninth edition' was published in London in 1777; further editions were published in London in 1784 and 1786, and in 1796 the work was issued as part of 'Cooke's edition of Sacred Classics'. I have found record of its publication as late as 1811 in England and 1831 in America.

¹¹ vii (March 1737), 188, 183.

¹² These letters reveal Mrs. Rowe as an intelligent and literate woman whose hermitage in Somerset was really only a pleasant country house which was not designed to shelter its main inhabitant from the literature and ideas of the day. In her letters she cites Cervantes, quotes Pascal, shows an intimate knowledge of Milton and Pope, sprinkles her letters with appropriate lines from other English poets such as Prior, Young, and Blackmore, and even describes her reading of Collier, Shaftesbury, and Berkeley. At one point she admits reading Fielding's The Modern Husband, which she thought a very good play, 'if nature, wit, and morality can make it so' (ii. 143).

¹³ In the Gentleman's Magazine, viii (April 1738), 210, appeared 'On the Loss of my eminent and pious Friend, Mrs. Rowe'; and in ix (March 1739), 152, an untitled and anonymous verse tribute was printed, and 'On the Death of Mrs. Rowe' by Elizabeth Carter. Amory, in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (London, 1755), summarized her life briefly and testified to the popularity and worthiness of her works: 'The ingenious, who did not know Mrs. Rowe, admired her for her writings; and her acquaintance loved and esteemed her for the many amiable qualities of her heart' (p. 334).

¹⁴ By 1738 a fifth edition was advertised in the February number of the London Magazine. I find record of editions published in England in 1740, 1743, 1750, 1753, 1756, 1774, 1776, 1786, 1804, 1811, and 1816. The editions of 1740 and 1743 were printed by Samuel Richardson, who had printed in 1738 volume ii of her Miscellaneous Works (see William M. Sale, Jr., Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca, New York, 1950), p. 200).

¹⁵ An interesting example of Mrs. Rowe's status as a minor pious classic comes in a note in Mrs. Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1939), p. 147. Mrs. Leavis quotes the Autobiography of Eliza Fletcher, born in Yorkshire in 1770 and one of the great ladies of Edinburgh at the turn of the century: ' "My father's library was upon a small scale—the Spectator, Milton's Works, Shakespeare's Plays, Pope's and Dryden's Poems, Hervey's Meditations, Mrs. Rowe's Letters, Shenstone's Poems, Sherlock's Sermons, with some abridgements of history and geography, filled his little bookshelves." '

¹⁶Boswell's Life of Johnson, eds., G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), i. 312.

¹⁷The Hypochondriack: Being the Seventy Essays by the Celebrated Biographer, James Boswell, ed., Margaret Bailey (Stanford, 1928), ii. 93–4.

¹⁸ John A. Dussinger's recent article, 'Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa,' PMLA, lxxxi (June 1966), 236–45, has emphasized Richardson's attempt to 'represent in his heroine the ultimate refinement of sensibility as the condition of salvation' (237).

¹⁹ See E. A. Baker, History of the English Novel, iii. 121–6.