Selena by Mary Tighe ed. by Harriet Kramer Linkin (review)

Mary Tighe’s five-volume novel tells the story of Selena Miltern’s journey to marriage through a series of convoluted plot twists that mix elements of the Gothic with the characteristics of a Bildungsroman. Originally written between 1801 and 1803 and titled after the young woman at the center of the narrative, the novel critiques arranged marriages, satirizes fashionable aristocrats, and offers a disquisition on sensibility. Harriet Kramer Linkin, who has done the heroic work of turning a manuscript that runs to almost 3,000 pages into a very readable edition, claims that Selena “invokes (and stands on par with) Burney’s Cecilia (1782), Smith’s Emmeline (1788), Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801)” and then claims that it “uncannily anticipates Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, and displays the scope, poignancy, and sly wit of so much of Dickens and Eliot” (p. 1). Mostly she is right. But a novel that reminds one of so many different kinds of novels and novelists is too messy to stand on par with Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen (never mind Dickens and Eliot). This is not to say that Selena is not highly entertaining, interesting, and worth reading. The convoluted plot lines, the lampooning of aristocrats, and the skewering of over-developed sensibilities are often bogged down in too much minutiae, but the characters and plot move the narrative along. It is not always easy to tell when the novel is performing satire or inviting it, but this confusion does not take away from what it does offer—a lively portrait of fashionable English life.

Born in Dublin, Tighe is known primarily as a poet, specifically for her epic poem “Psyche; or, The Legend of Love.” Keats was a fan of her work, and she moved in the same cultural milieu as Edgeworth, Austen, and other women writers (it is worth noting that Selena Miltern leaves Wordsworth’s Wye Valley as her story begins). It is not entirely clear why Tighe turned to fiction, but Linkin provides ample evidence that, like Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, the novel has aspects of a roman à clef. Averill Buchanan’s detailed description of the novel highlights how Tighe used the form to participate in conversations about religion (particularly Methodism) and absenteeism (as Edgeworth does in Castle Rackrent). Linkin explains Tighe’s relative affluence, which was, perhaps, the reason she opted not to publish the novel in her lifetime. Tighe’s brother Henry approached the influential Longman publishers about a posthumous edition of Selena, but Linkin speculates that some worried that the angelic poetess’s reputation might be sullied by such a barbed, street-smart novel.

Selena is the story of two young women—the eponymous Selena and Emily Trevallyn (née Montrose)—who, in deference to misguided parents, marry the wrong men. Over the course of the novel and through numerous locations in London and Europe, Selena finds happiness when her first husband dies and she is free to marry the man she has secretly loved for four volumes. Emily Trevallyn’s very old, very wealthy husband Lord Trevallyn dies, leaving her a rich widow. She also learns that the cousin she has been pining for has seduced and abandoned another young woman. In addition to the main female figures, the novel portrays women who run the gamut from comic foils to cautionary tales. The novel is, perhaps, most interesting in its depictions of female relationships—maternal ones, platonic ones, and relationships between rivals. Particularly compelling are the platonic relationships among and between women characters. Tighe quickly sets up the romance plot but it is the relationships between the women that keep the narrator’s attention. Like Catherine Moreland and Eleanor Tilney in Northanger Abbey, women in this novel yearn for time with one another and struggle for escape from men who feel entitled to their time and attention.

Selena is set in the cultural moment when young women were moving...