Something New, and: Millenium Hall (review)

122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:1 Anne Plumptre. Something New. Ed. Deborah McLeod. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1966. xxix + 349pp. $15.95; US$12.95. ISBN 1-55111-079-2. Sarah Scott. Millenium Hall. Ed. Gary Kelly. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1966. 256pp. $15.95; US$12.95. ISBN 1-55111-015-6. These novels surround unconventional female strength with male bustle and conclude with the reform of male libertines. Published four decades apart, though, they confront different historical situations. The less familiar and more openly assertive writer is Anne Plumptre (pronounced "Plumpter": see p. xxii, n. 1), an English Jacobin and defender of Napoleon who, radically assured of her position as a writer, chooses literary weapons. The very title of this epistolary novel, Something New: or, Adventures at Campbell-House (1801), challenges narrative convention—specifically the convention that a heroine must be beautiful but consequently, as Deborah McLeod observes, the objectifying courtship plot itself. More familiar because more influential, the bluestocking feminist Sarah Scott blends the novelistic with the Arcadian, millennial, and Utopian. Famous for its pious, industrious, and mutually supportive female community, A Description ofMillenium Hall (1762) plays Utopian ideal against dystopian social realities. Oppressive representations invite subversive wit, so Something New exploits parody and comic duplication. From the moment Lionel Stanhope and Henry Egerton assume each other's identities to enter a house presided over by a woman apparently devoted to chivalric romance, they display culturally "feminine" qualities. Giddy, romantically deluded, slavishly fashionable, and inescapably voluble—they write most of the letters—they highlight by contrast the "masculine " self-command and decisive social agency of Olivia Campbell, the plain but formidably rational heroine. At first pitied for her appearance, Olivia soon commands admiration. Independent of fortune as well as of mind, she cherishes "romantic ideas of wedded happiness" (p. 243) without needing to change an enviable situation with great scope for benevolent action. She reclaims a woman seduced by a brutal squire, for example, and supports a deserving but poor man of learning whose company she enjoys. Her rational defiance of custom predictably provokes opposition—"she has uniformly defied all the rules decorum prescribes to her sex" (p. 205), complains an anonymous letter—but Plumptre satirizes Olivia's gossiping critics as meanly provincial in language and thought. Duplicated romantic entanglements vary the courtship plot to include calculated seduction, clandestine marriage, the agonies of separation, even self-denial. Evidently marriageable, Charlotte O'Brien indulges her sensibility in an affecting poem about a poor lunatic; possibly unmarriageable, Henry distracts himself from losing Emily by indulging his in self-destructive dissipation. Superior to a seducer such as Jane Austen's George Wickham, he falls well short of the high moral ground: "I sought no higher gratification than what was to be purchased at a stated price" (p. 74). Wiser, the rejected Lionel prefers Charlotte's strategy. His poetical effusion, "To a Jack-Ass," is inspired by a mournful donkey which he then relieves from a convenient hayrick: "could any thing," he REVIEWS 123 asks, "be more truly sentimental, than this transaction?" (p. 221). Like Sterne, Plumptre deploys conventions with knowing irony. An influence on Something New, Sarah Robinson Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall ... By a Gentleman on His Travels (1762) convincingly details its Utopian reimagination of the country house. For example, a Utopian-satiric fantasy about a refuge for dwarves formerly exhibited as freaks deftly modulates into social policy, thereby reflecting on the competitive vanity of the oppressed. (Informed by Gulliver's Travels, this section lurks behind the midget treated charitably in Something New.) Sensitivity to injustice also typifies the histories of Miss Mancel, Mrs Morgan, Lady Mary Jones, Mrs Selvyn, and Mrs Trentham— the proprietors of Millenium Hall. In a section that speaks to modern concerns, Miss Mancel's apparently benevolent guardian refuses to recognize that "the caresses which suited her earlier years were now become improper" (p. 97). Powerless, her friends can counsel only trust in providence—such piety being an ideology of the oppressed, as Gary Kelly points out (pp. 32-33). Probably more relieved than persuaded when an apoplexy ex machina removes Mr Hintman, who turns out to have been a cynical libertine, a...