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A review by thesummer
Belinda by Maria Edgeworth
3.0
3.5 stars
An interesting and enjoyable read. I found this while looking for contemporaries to Jane Austen, and I'm not sure why I expected it to be like Austen, but it isn't at all. It is still very recognizably a comedy of manners and was funny and witty, but where Austen contents herself to her two-inch square of ivory that is landed gentry chilling in the countryside, Edgeworth's plots take us a bit more into the realm of the overdramatic and requires-suspension-of-disbelief (ie. one character reads Rousseau's Emile, takes it way too literally, and goes out and finds an innocent sheltered girl to educate and raise into becoming his ideal wife). Not necessarily a bad thing, but different. It reminded me of Shelley's Frankenstein and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels in the dramatic plots and stories-within-a-story, and of Cervante's Don Quixote at times in the way it made fun of romance novel tropes and poked at the fourth wall.
Belinda is a solid titular character for a romance/ comedy of manners: a young girl newly entering society who is intelligent, firm, kind, sensible etc. But a perfect heroine, especially a prissy model of principle and virtue like Belinda, is hardly interesting and only leads to yawns, which is why the more mature Lady Delacour steals every scene she is in and indeed steals the entire novel. Lady Delacour is the consummate Slytherin in her social smarts, jaded and witty, but temperamental, suspicious, and morally pretty darn grey; sparkling in society but miserable at home with her life. She makes for a far more interesting character and is the propelling force behind the whole novel. That's why, when her character development arc more or less resolves halfway/two thirds of the way through, the novel loses steam. Because the last third was just about the overblown dramas of Belinda's two suitors, and to be honest, I couldn't care less about them. Belinda is mostly only interesting as a foil to Lady Delacour; she's the straight woman of the piece.
This was also an interesting read because it's the first one from the period I've read where we have people of colour: one of the points on the love triangle is Mr Vincent, who is West Indian Creole, and there is an interracial marriage between servants depicted. These were both edited out/ toned down in a later edition by Edgeworth's less progressive father, so this must have been a little edgy at the time. The depiction of the black servant is not kosher by today's standards of how to write characters of colour (read: racist, but not worse than, say, Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles), and there does not seem to be any compunction with Mr. Vincent's fortune coming from slaves (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what it means in 1700s/1800s novels when they refer to someone's money as coming from the West Indies). However, the characters of colour that we do have, combined with a scene where some characters discuss a popular abolitionist poem at the time, give some food for thought. I like to talk about how it's difficult to judge past authors by today's standards, but it's clear in Belinda that abolitionist discourse was accessible and well-known by the the late 1700s/ early 1800s, and that a mixed person of colour who had a rich gentleman as a father was acceptable as a suitor to a young lady of the gentry. This paints a harsher standard by which we can be judging historical authors, and provides even fewer excuses to contemporary authors of historical fiction who choose to only write about white people.
An interesting and enjoyable read. I found this while looking for contemporaries to Jane Austen, and I'm not sure why I expected it to be like Austen, but it isn't at all. It is still very recognizably a comedy of manners and was funny and witty, but where Austen contents herself to her two-inch square of ivory that is landed gentry chilling in the countryside, Edgeworth's plots take us a bit more into the realm of the overdramatic and requires-suspension-of-disbelief (ie. one character reads Rousseau's Emile, takes it way too literally, and goes out and finds an innocent sheltered girl to educate and raise into becoming his ideal wife). Not necessarily a bad thing, but different. It reminded me of Shelley's Frankenstein and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels in the dramatic plots and stories-within-a-story, and of Cervante's Don Quixote at times in the way it made fun of romance novel tropes and poked at the fourth wall.
Belinda is a solid titular character for a romance/ comedy of manners: a young girl newly entering society who is intelligent, firm, kind, sensible etc. But a perfect heroine, especially a prissy model of principle and virtue like Belinda, is hardly interesting and only leads to yawns, which is why the more mature Lady Delacour steals every scene she is in and indeed steals the entire novel. Lady Delacour is the consummate Slytherin in her social smarts, jaded and witty, but temperamental, suspicious, and morally pretty darn grey; sparkling in society but miserable at home with her life. She makes for a far more interesting character and is the propelling force behind the whole novel. That's why, when her character development arc more or less resolves halfway/two thirds of the way through, the novel loses steam. Because the last third was just about the overblown dramas of Belinda's two suitors, and to be honest, I couldn't care less about them.
Spoiler
I couldn't bring myself to be invested in Belinda/Hervey because their actual courtship early on was so :/ Hervey just goes from being like "Ah she's artfully trying to entrap me into a marriage!" to "I was wrong, she is perfect and modest and I love her!" and there's like no basis for Belinda being into him. Also, how the hell am I supposed to take Hervey seriously given the aforementioned Rousseau Emile incident?This was also an interesting read because it's the first one from the period I've read where we have people of colour: one of the points on the love triangle is Mr Vincent, who is West Indian Creole, and there is an interracial marriage between servants depicted. These were both edited out/ toned down in a later edition by Edgeworth's less progressive father, so this must have been a little edgy at the time. The depiction of the black servant is not kosher by today's standards of how to write characters of colour (read: racist, but not worse than, say, Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles), and there does not seem to be any compunction with Mr. Vincent's fortune coming from slaves (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what it means in 1700s/1800s novels when they refer to someone's money as coming from the West Indies). However, the characters of colour that we do have, combined with a scene where some characters discuss a popular abolitionist poem at the time, give some food for thought. I like to talk about how it's difficult to judge past authors by today's standards, but it's clear in Belinda that abolitionist discourse was accessible and well-known by the the late 1700s/ early 1800s, and that a mixed person of colour who had a rich gentleman as a father was acceptable as a suitor to a young lady of the gentry. This paints a harsher standard by which we can be judging historical authors, and provides even fewer excuses to contemporary authors of historical fiction who choose to only write about white people.