Emma; or, The Unfortunate Attachment: A Sentimental Novel

Preface xi LADY GEORGIANA SPENCER WAS a patron of the arts, a writer, a musician , and an amateur scientist. Art historians know her as the subject of eighteenth-century portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds that feature her sometimes outlandish innovations in fashion, hairstyle, and taste. Thrown into what she later described as the “vortex of dissipation” at a young age, Lady Georgiana used her charisma to aid the cause of the Whigs. Her circle at Devonshire House inspired Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal , which she saw on its opening night; later she helped launch Sheridan’s political career as MP for Stafford. Her most visible political success, however, occurred when she undertook a massive public relations campaign that secured Charles James Fox’s reelection in 1784. She solved various crises in the government connected with the Prince Regent’s marriage to Maria Fitzherbert, and Devonshire House soon became the de facto meeting place for the Whig party during their long period in the political wilderness under George III. One French diplomat complained that her pregnancy in the late 1780s interrupted the flow of political business in the English capitol. At Althorp and Spencer House in London, Lady Georgiana was fêted, on various occasions, by David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne. They wrote odes in her honor, visited her soirées at Chatsworth, and Sterne even dedicated the sixth book of Tristram Shandy to Lady Georgiana’s mother. Lady Georgiana continued her mother’s tradition of patronizing writers by supporting the talents of Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Ann Yearsley, and Charlotte Smith; a long line of actresses, including Dorothy Jordan, Mrs. Nunns, and Sarah Siddons owed their London triumphs, in part, to Lady Georgiana’s active endeavors xii Preface on their behalf. Though readers have become familiar with Regency society through the works of Jane Austen and the reprinting of works by Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, the perspective of the aristocratic class on the period just before this time—contemporaneous with the American Revolution—has not received as much attention. “What is the history of rich, powerful and establishment women?” Linda Colley asked in the Sunday Times (April 17, 1994). “Few people write it, so the question is rarely asked.” This edition of Emma, or The Unfortunate Attachment builds on Amanda Foreman’s award-winning biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1998) and seeks to provide a literary response to Colley’s important question. Lady Georgiana was the likely author of two novels. The first of these, Emma; or The Unfortunate Attachment (1773), appeared when she was only sixteen and anticipates many of the major events of her life. The second, The Sylph, advertised with Fanny Burney’s Evelina, reached a London audience in 1779, when Lady Georgiana’s reputation as an arbitress of fashion was already secure. Because she published her novels anonymously, Lady Georgiana’s authorship cannot be definitively determined . By examining the circumstances that led her to write them, however, the reader can learn much about the outlook of aristocratic women in the late-eighteenth century. Emma’s complex depiction of an arranged marriage, which borrows at times from Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, adds a woman’s voice (complementing Fanny Burney’s, Frances Sheridan’s, and numerous others) to the history of the epistolary novel. In its reliance on ellipses and italics to convey heightened emotion, Emma is very much a work of its day: its subtitle, after all, is “a sentimental novel.” As such, it reflects the influence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). At the same time, Emma anticipates Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) in several ways, reflecting a more ironic treatment of unbridled feeling. Before Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, Lady Georgiana took up the subject of feckless husbands and dandies, satirizing the “strutting boobies who would be the supreme rulers of it [this world] in everything,” as Kitty Bishop puts it. More tentatively, she broached feminist themes explored by Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792). She sympathized with Robinson and Smith’s perspective enough to assist them actively in publishing their works. What becomes clear from actresses’ diaries and press accounts of Lady Georgiana’s patronage is that the boundaries between Whig politics , fashion, and musicianship were quite permeable. For this reason, it would be a mistake to view Lady Georgiana...