Belinda by Maria Edgeworth

For my 2018 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic with a one word title, I chose Belinda by Maria Edgeworth published 1801.  Maria Edgeworth in her day was a very popular Anglo/Irish author who wrote books on education, children's stories and novels two of which are considered classics, Belinda and Castle Rackrent.  Jane Austen greatly admired this author and that is high praise.

Belinda begins at the turn of the nineteenth century in the town of Bath.  Mrs Stanhope a formidable woman in the matchmaking department has arranged for her youngest niece, Belinda Portman, to spend the winter season in London where she will stay with the fashionable Lady Delacour.  There will be parties, balls, theater events to attend but the ultimate goal as Mrs. Stanhope makes clear to Belinda is to find a suitable marriage partner.

Soon after arriving in London Belinda meets Clarence Hervey who she is smitten with but at a costume ball she is crushed when she overhears Hervey mocking both her and her Aunt to his friends.  Their relationship starts off with a number of obstacles the most serious of which is that Hervey may have a mistress.  As for Belinda she begins a courtship with a man from the West Indies, Mr. Vincent, who unbeknownst to Belinda has a gambling problem.  Meanwhile Lady Delacour is not up to the challenge of mentoring Belinda if anything Lady Delacour needs a mentor.  Her marriage to Lord Delacour, for example, is an unhappy union and in confiding to Belinda why she married him, Lady Delacour puts it as follows:

"I was a rich heiress ...I was handsone and witty ... Having told you my fortune need I add, that I, or it, had lovers in abundance  ...  of all sorts and degrees - not to reckon those, it may be presumed, who died of concealed passions for me ... any girl who is not used to having a parcel of admirers, would think it the easiest thing in the world to make her choice; but let her judge by what she feels when a dexterous mercer or linen draper produces pretty thing after pretty thing  - and this is so becoming, and this will wear forever ...the novice stands in a charming perplexity, and after examining, and doubting and tossing over half the goods in the shop , it's ten to one, when it begins to get late, the young lady, in a hurry, pitches upon the very ugliest and worst thing that she has seen ... Sad was the hour and luckless was the day I pitched upon viscount Delacour for my lord and judge".  

Lady Delacour is quite the character, witty, dramatic, funny.  Readers and critics have said over the years that she is actually the star of this book but Belinda is impressive too, like Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice who would come after her, Belinda is very well grounded for someone so young, intelligent, rational and only willing to marry if she can find a husband she has affection for and  respects.  Belinda has been referred to as a novel of female development, a popular genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which would end with the young woman married since the life of a woman in the early nineteenth century if she remained single was not a happy one as Mrs Stanhope grimly lays out in her cautionary advice to her neice.  Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney and of course Jane Austen are the most shining practitioners of the novel of female development.  Although the irony is that Edgeworth and Austen never married.

There is much to recommend about Belinda but I had a serious problem with the novel as well, the anti-semitism I encountered in the book, specifically in the creation of Mr Solomon who is not so much a character as a caricature.  This is a problem one gets into when reading some of the classics where you will be enjoying a novel and then come upon bigotry and it stains the book for you. 

But this story has an interesting ending.  In 1815 Rachel Mordecai a young teacher living in North Carolina and a fan of Edgeworth's novels and books on education decided to write the author a letter.  Rachel who was Jewish was hurt by what she was reading in Edgeworth's novels: "how can it be that she, whom on all other subjects shows justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudices?"  Edgeworth upon receiving this letter was clearly moved and responded "Your polite, benevolent and touching letter has given me much pleasure, and much pain.  As to the pain I hope you will some time see that it has excited me to make all the atonement and reparation in my power for the past".  Edgeworth the following year wrote the novel Harrington which tackled the subject of anti-semitism and how wrong it is head on.  As for Maria Edgeworth and Rachel Mordecai they began a friendship and a lifelong correspondence which their families would continue well into the 20th century.