Edgeworth was a popular “lady novelist” of Jane Austen’s time, perhaps best-known today for her novels (Castle Rackrent, etc) critiquing the Anglo-Irish gentry and their mistreatment of their Irish Catholic tenants. Austen admired her enough to namecheck Belinda in a positive way in Northanger Abbey, and sent her a copy of Emma upon publication. Edgeworth took a while to warm up to Emma and disliked Northanger Abbey even more heartily than I do, but thought moderately well of Mansfield Park, and when I read Belinda for myself, I saw a certain resemblance to Mansfield Park: the thousand foot view of the plot, the messy characters. The setting, the character types and the plot are very different though, and the craftmanship not in Jane Austen’s league. That’s the short version; if you want more details, along with spoilers for most major plot twists, plus me pontificating about adaptation possibilities, read on….

I liked the title character herself just fine. She’s a pleasant, level-headed young woman who’s been shoved onto the marriage market by an aunt famous for her matchmaking abilities, and is trying to figure out who she is and what she wants, in between dealing with drama from her friends and suitors. The catch is that she gets a bit lost in the shuffle of all the drama caused by:

-Lady Delacour: this is the high-society friend Belinda is staying with in London. In her mid-thirties, Lady Delacour is clever, socially adroit and good-looking, but miserable. She’s stressed by the “keeping up appearances” part of her lifestyle, by her estrangement from her husband (a man whom she never respected, but married in order to spite an ex-boyfriend), and by a diagnosis of what seems to be breast cancer(1), eventually proven to be false. Oh, yeah, and her previous BFF, the “Amazonian” Harriet Freke, just blew her off and allied with Lady Delacour’s mean-girl nemesis. This sets Lady Delacour up to be more open to positive influences from Belinda, and from Lady Delacour’s platonic-ish younger male friend…

-Clarence “Clary” Hervey: Belinda’s love interest. I hesitate to call him a hero. He’s supposed to be this incredibly clever, witty, charismatic guy, but since Edgeworth can’t write male dialogue to save her life, this doesn’t come across very well. My favorite moments were him in budding “mad scientist” mode. The first time we meet him, he’s going as himself to a masquerade, because he built a complex, partially mechanized snake costume for himself and then set fire to it mucking about with phosphorus to make the eyes glow. And then there’s the time where he speculates that you could, theoretically, count the pulse in the neck of a woman cosplaying as Queen Elizabeth I by watching the vibrations of her neck-ruff. (Don’t think it would work, but points for imagination, kid.) If some crazy person paid me an obscene amount of money to give this book the tv miniseries treatment, I’d play up this aspect of his personality a lot more than the occasional bits that pop up here and there in the novel, especially since his most embarrassing and least heroic moment is tied directly to it…

–Good Man Can’t Marry Good Woman Because Honorable Reasons seems to have been a common trope in this era, and Edgeworth doesn’t handle it well here. Clarence associates with a bunch of hard-partying, oathy scumbags who talk in Regency cant. They in turn are convinced that he has a very young, pretty mistress. Actually, about a year before the present-day of the story, he was a young, nerdy intellectual of twenty-three, who luuuurved Rousseau’s works but hated the overt and often mercenary sexuality he saw in pre-Revolutionary France. On returning to England and meeting a sheltered young woman, sixteen going on seventeen, he renamed her from Rachel to Virginia (after the heroine of a novel influenced by Rousseau but not written by him) and decided to have a respectable older woman educate the young lady into a suitable wife for him, while he only visits said young lady occasionally to see how her book-learning is coming along.(2) Since then, he’s met and fallen for Belinda, but he still feels honor-bound to marry the other young woman, a responsibility he is only relieved of because Rachel/Virginia fell in insta-love with a man at first sight years ago, and the man returns in the nick of tim. By happy coincidence, Insta-lover turns out to be on good terms with Rachel’s longlost father whom Clarence has recently rediscovered. Clarence’s exercise in wife husbandry is utterly idiotic, and Edgeworth doesn’t pretend it is anything else, but it’s much more chaste than you’d expect, and believable as the kind of hair-brained “experimental” thing that would occur to this guy.

—I wonder if possibly the Harriet Smith subplot in Emma was inspired by the Rachel/Virginia subplot in Belinda: instead of a man wanting to shape the perfect wife for himself, it’s a woman who doesn’t want to marry, trying to shape another woman to be the perfect wife for one of the gentleman of her acquaintance, sort of a robot she can vicariously experience courtship through.

-Belinda also befriends Lady Delacour’s ex-flame and the ex-flame’s wife, who are very tiresome when they talk morality (have I mentioned how terrible Edgworth is with any kind of dialogue except snarky repartee among women?) but otherwise are pleasant people. Belinda seems to find them soothing to be around, after the DRAMA of the Delacour household, and that was my reaction as well. They encourage a romance between Belinda and Mr. Vincent, a young “creole” man,(3) heir to West Indies wealth. But he fails a moral test he sets himself (gambling) and Belinda has a deep-seated fear of what that addiction can do to people (it’s one of the problems in the Delacour household). So Clarence finds his road to Belinda’s hand clear after all, and Lady Delacour closes the book on a snarky, metatextual note, confidently predicting wedding bells between her two favorite friends.

-If someone paid me a ludicrous amount of money to turn this into a miniseries, I would probably drag most of Lady Delacour’s wacky flashback hijinks into present tense, so that, for instance, Belinda gets to be present (in hopes of reconciling the enemies) at the almost duel between Lady Delacour and her mean girl rival, and she gets rescued right along with them from an angry mob by one of Clarence’s wacky schemes. Ditto the business with Rachel: I would intersperse into the main plot brief vignettes of Clarence visiting this beautiful young woman whom he doesn’t seem that attracted to and versa, while the girl’s duenna keeps telling her that she’s supposed to marry Clarence. I would also overhaul about eighty percent of the dialogue, remove stuff about “lazy creoles” and “superstitious, inarticulate blacks” and make the stereotypical Jewish moneylender not Jewish. I would keep the scene where Mr. Vincent’s servant and dog ambush the moneylender, because I think modern audiences would find it pretty funny without the ethnic jokes.

-If you like Georgette Heyer, you will probably get a kick out of how much this book tells you about the period. If you like Jane Austen, you might like Belinda’s long introspections about her inability to let go emotionally of Clarence, even when he seems lost to her and Mr. Vincent is looking like the sensible choice recommended by sensible people – that was probably the most psychologically real section of the story. If you like Margery Allingham, Lady Delacour’s ex-BFF Harriet Freke is basically a Regency precursor to the villainess in Look to the Lady, so much so that I started having flashbacks to Albert Campion’s misadventures in the stables. I personally also enjoyed watching the Delacours clean up their act. But this just isn’t up to par with the best fiction written in this period, or about this period.

(1) Yes, they knew about breast cancer back then. Fanny Burney, another novelist of roughly the same timeframe, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1810, and underwent a mastectomy. Without anesthetics.

(2) A much worse case of wife husbandry occurred in real life, in Edgeworth’s father’s circle of friends, involving a man named Thomas Day. He took over the upbringing of a twelve-year-old girl he named Sabrina Sidney. He worked poor Sabrina like a donkey, and tortured her psychologically and physically in the name of teaching her stoicism. By contrast, the character in Belinda basically just goes from a sheltered life in a cottage being useful to her grandmother to a sheltered life of reading historical novels with an older lady who encourages her to believe that she will have to marry Clarence, who’s been trying to keep the girl at a respectful distance until her education is complete.

(3) Creole can mean “mixed race,” but the English of this period considered French and Spanish people to be different “races” from each other and from the English, so it’s unclear whether Mr. Vincent would be “biracial” in the modern sense of the word. I would probably cast him that way if in charge of a miniseries. Later editions of the book edit out the marriage between Vincent’s patois-speaking black servant and a white, British servant woman, and also edit out any suggestion that Belinda might consider marrying Vincent. I don’t know that it proves anything either way, but it’s interesting, as is the fact that Edgworth goes out of her way to have Vincent’s servant AND a wealthy, educated white character fall victim to more or less the same “Scooby Doo” ploy by the same villain, as if trying to say that it’s not the servant’s race or his education level that makes him susceptible to this kind of harassment.