Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel

• 2. Isles of Happiness
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 83-121
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CHAPTER TWO
Isles of Happiness

In the dedication to Edward Young, Rowe associated Friendship in Death with fairy tales: “The greatest Infidel must own, there is at least as much Probability in this Scheme, as in that of the FAIRY TALES, which however Visionary, are some of them Moral, and Entertaining.”¹ Notably, subsequent volumes of her fiction picked up “Moral and Entertaining.” Rowe meant a special kind of fairy tale, one now forgotten, but, I believe, an unrecognized influence on the eighteenth-century English novel. In 1690, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d’Aulnoy, published the first French literary fairy tale, coined the term conte de fées, and went on to write at least twenty-four more. Rowe read d’Aulnoy with pleasure and occasionally commented on her texts, as she did on Le Comte de Warwick when she told Hertford that “some beautiful parts of [the Countess of Warwick’s] character” reminded her of Hertford (Misc. Works, 2:116). D’Aulnoy’s carefully wrought tale “L’Île de la félicité,” or “The Island of Happiness,” was told by the hero in d’Aulnoy’s first novel, Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (1690), and it was quickly translated into English and published as The History of Adolphus, Prince of Russia; and the Princess of Happiness With a Collection of Songs and Love-Verses. By Several Hands. To which is added, Two Letters in Verse from Sir. G.E. to the E. of M. with Mr. D. [sic] Answer to them (1691).² As Nancy and Melvin Palmer write, d’Aulnoy’s tales had none of Perrault’s “lower-class characters and menial tasks, their poor cottages, their ugly clothes.”³ And she certainly never styled herself anything approximating “Mother Goose” as Perrault did.⁴ The Isle of Happiness set the pattern for the literary fairy tale. It is longer than popular culture fairy tales, more complex, stylistically distinctive, highly intertextual, filled with plot twists, and was originally published as an interpolated, thematically enriching narrative.⁵ Moreover, like Rowe’s and Sarah Fielding’s fairy tales, it is a “complex” tale, one contained in a larger text and not intended to stand alone. In addition to Prince Adolphus, eleven of d’Aulnoy’s other tales were in her novels.⁶ In France and England she was one of the most read writers in all three genres in which she excelled: novel, travel memoir, and fairy tale.

D’Aulnoy’s fairy tales inaugurated a fad that quickly spread to England and paved the way by the end of the seventeenth century for something of a rage for the multiple collections of her fairy tales.⁷ The popularity of her texts is truly arresting, and, although there were other conteuses (female fairy-tale writers), her unmatched popularity allows me to concentrate on her in this chapter. At least thirty-six editions of her work were published in England between 1691 and 1740, and her Travels into Spain required more editions than even The Arabian Nights.⁸ Les contes des fées (4 vols., 1697; fourteen tales) and Les contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode (4 vols., 1698; nine new tales) followed. The first volume of Les contes des fées was translated and published as Tales of the Fairies in 1699⁹; volumes 1 and 2 of it appeared in volume 4 of The Diverting Works of the Countess d’Aunois in 1707, providing a total of twenty tales, nine tales from Contes des fées and the rest from her novels. Volumes 3 and 4 of Diverting Works combined with volumes 1–4 of Contes Nouveaux appeared as A Collection of Novels and Tales, written by that celebrated wit of France, the Countess d’Anois (2 vols.) in 1721. It eliminated a few tales but brought together the fairy tales from the framing novels. A third volume came out in 1722, and they would be sold together as A Collection of Novels and Tales of the Fairies, Written by the Celebrated Wit of France, the Countess D’Anois as a three-volume set in 1728, the year that Friendship in Death first appeared. The first translation of Hypolitus came out in 1708, thereby providing a much better translation of Isle of Happiness (2nd edition, 1711). Numerous editions of her fairy tales, then, appeared before the publication of Friendship in Death. In fact, her fairy tales were more widely available than the six editions suggest. Several were interpolated in her novels, which were frequently reprinted, and the fairy tales were repeatedly published in different combinations; The History of the Tales of the Fairies. Newly done from the French (1716), for example, includes seven of the most artful, literary tales (Graciosa and Percinet, The Blew Bird and Florina, The Golden Bough, and The Orange Tree and its Beloved Bee, for instance). By 1799 there had been at least twenty-two English editions of d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales.¹⁰

For decades scholars have identified sources, influences, and origins of the English novel, and studies by Ian Watt, William Warner, Lennard Davis, Jane Spencer, Michael McKeon, and J. Paul Hunter are especially familiar. Because they were available so early and reprinted so frequently in the period during which English women began to write novels, d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales merit inclusion but have not been. Hunter, for instance, asserts that fairy tales “disappeared from the English public consciousness” and calls it a mystery. His emphasis is on what he calls “the old oral culture of the English countryside,”¹¹ but, as we know, the inherited fairy tales of cultures are blends of the oral and the newly written that flow together and would not survive without writing. Specialists in French literature have raised questions about the history of the English novel since at least 1974. That year the Palmers had mused, “One wonders if English fiction would have taken quite the form it did take had it not been for such conteurs de féerie as Mme d’Aulnoy, Mme de Murat, and their followers.”¹² In an essay that argues that the country of a writer’s birth is not the “sole determinant of national affiliation” and that the transnational nature of the eighteenth-century novel problematizes identifying an author, such as Samuel Richardson or Madame de Lafayette, with a single nation, Joan DeJean raises the question that I addressed, “Does [d’Aulnoy] … belong … to an extent worthy of some form of official recognition, to the English tradition of prose fiction?”¹³ Anne Duggan points out that d’Aulnoy’s tales and Histoire d’Hypolite were very popular between 1740 and 1770 and influenced Ann Radcliffe.¹⁴ Like Beasley’s and Richetti’s speculations about Rowe’s fictional influence, these hints about fairy tales were ignored.

How many and what kinds of fairy tales eighteenth-century English women wrote are yet unknown. A beginning survey locates them in every genre and with surprisingly prestigious, literary origins. The best-known fairy tales by an eighteenth-century woman are unquestionably the two embedded in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), and this text has attracted specialists across a range of disciplines and national literatures. Writers like Rowe and Fielding lived in a culture with as much if not more knowledge of a literary history of fairy tales as of folk fairy tales. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), and Ben Jonson’s Oberon, The Faery Prince (a masque performed at court in 1611 and later printed) were among the best-known English sources of fairy literature. Two years before the publication of Friendship in Death, Jane Barker, who had lived in France, included a fairy tale as a dream in The Lining of the Patch Work Screen. Also earlier is Jane Wiseman Holt’s Sent with a pair of China Basons (1717). It is a delightful poem with most of the favorite English portrayals of fairies:

Titania Queen of Fairy-land

Who Crowns the Dance and leads the Band,
When o’er the Hills and Lawns they pass
In wanton Circles on the Grass.¹⁵

Titania’s favorite elves are banished to India by Oberon for mischievous pranks. They learn Eastern arts and produce the magic basins, which a mortal “In Honour of our Queen and Kind” can give to her dear friend: “Ten Thousand Graces let her Wear / … / Who shall call this Bason hers” (13–14).

The literary fairy tales of the French feminists are an intriguing, neglected influence on British fairy tales and, in fact, on the mid-eighteenth-century English novel, one no one has taken seriously as an important strain flowing into the novel form. Rowe’s Friendship in Death with Letters was an important conduit for adaptations of their sensibilities. She was publishing her later volumes at the very beginning of the third wave or vogue for fairy tales (1730–1758), the period Jean-Paul Sermain calls “Diversifications.”¹⁶ We now know that in spite of her retirement Rowe was attuned to happenings in London, perhaps especially literary events. There is some possibility that d’Aulnoy spent time in England, and the rapid translation and strong sales of her work led critics such as Joan DeJean to conclude that she “attained impressive status in England” and Victor Watson to say that most “well-read” women of the eighteenth-century were familiar with her tales.¹⁷ As British women so often did with French literature, Rowe “englished” d’Aulnoy’s fairy-tale style, making it appealing and appropriate in style, content, and fantasy. She included at least five fairy tales and numerous references to fairies in her fiction.

Influential critical voices praised the literary fairy tale, which had quickly become a recognizable genre. As knowledgeable modern critics argue, “The framework of fantasy is used to mediate fundamental truths or painful realities. … They are essentially adult stories using fantasy.”¹⁸ Jonathan Swift, for instance, wrote to Stella that he had been reading Conte des fées “for two days, although I have much business upon my hands.”¹⁹ Joseph Addison noted that “the Fairie way of Writing” was “more difficult than any other” and required “an Imagination naturally fruitful and superstitious.”²⁰ His phrasing suggests that he knew that the conteuses referred to themselves in the salons as fairies or sibyls. Murat had dedicated her Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (1699) to “modern fairies,” her friends the salon writers.²¹ Fairy tales delighted his “Imagination with the Strangeness and Novelty of the Persons who are represented in them” (Spectator, 3:571), and literary precedents of fairy appearances from Shakespeare and Milton further gave legitimacy to Rowe’s employment of them. As late as 1770, catalogues of very small libraries, public and private, included fairy tales and Rowe’s Letters, as did that of Eliza Fletcher, daughter of a “yeoman farmer” in Yorkshire.²²

The frontispiece to the 1716 English edition of d’Aulnoy’s History of the Tales of the Fairies is dominated by the king and queen of hearts looking down upon a small circle of tiny dancing folk. Although probably not intended to be so, the proportions symbolize the literary fairy tales—they are about love, and fairies and magic often play small parts.²³ The tales relate the adventures and trials of a hero or heroine and, therefore, had many similarities to the brief tales in French romances but, as John Hawkesworth remarked in a 1752 essay on the pleasures of various genres, had the added attraction of new scenes and surprising possibilities.²⁴ The only author Hawkesworth mentions is d’Aulnoy as he expands upon the pleasures of fairy tales, contrasting them to the novel. He wrote that “the most extravagant, and yet perhaps the most generally pleasing of all literary performances, are those in which supernatural events are every moment produced by Genii and Fairies; such are … the Tales of the Countess d’Anois, and many others of the same class.” Of the novel, he writes, “The narrative often stands still; the lovers compliment each other in tedious letters and set speeches, trivial circumstances are enumerated with a minute exactness, and the reader is wearied with … impertinent declamation.”²⁵ Implicit in Hawkesworth’s complaint are the inclusion of essays within novels and the kind of “dilated” conversations found in Defoe’s Religious Courtship and Richardson’s Clarissa.

I am categorizing fairy tale as many specialists do as “wonder tales” defined by their plot trajectory rather than the inclusion of fairies. Disguises, shape changing, and “magic” characterize the literary fairy tales as much as appearances by fairies, but the amount of these things varied tale by tale from none to being one of the most significant plot elements. Magic might be, among other things, an unlikely event, coincidence, or a sudden appearance. The characters’ and, therefore, the readers’ openness to “magic” possibilities was the real common denominator.²⁶ Polidore, the author of one of Rowe’s Letters, hopes—as Hawkesworth says readers did when reading such tales—that a beautiful child he spies adorning a lamb with flowers is a fairy or “some pretty phantom” (3:203–4). The child’s youth and beauty contrast with the gothic setting, and Polidore hopes for a pleasing encounter and adventure. Most commonly, the protagonist is driven away from home, experiences adventures and hardships, and is finally returned to his/her “just social, economic, and political position.”²⁷ In stories like Cinderella and Pamela, the character’s merit (ability, virtue) replaces birth or rank. The literary fairy tale is significantly different from the fairy tales we know today. Charles Perrault, whose Histories of Past Times with Morals (1697) was not published in translation until 1729 and the second edition not until 1737, has overshadowed d’Aulnoy and has come to be believed the more popular and, with the Grimm brothers’ collections, to epitomize the genre.²⁸ This opinion needs correction and the differences recognized in their reception and “use” in the early eighteenth century in England. “Approximately two-thirds of the seventeenth-century contes de fées were written by the conteuses,” and all over Europe women’s work took up more than half of collections such as the forty-one-volume Le Cabinet des fées, a title that would have reminded most readers that Hypolite tells the tale of Adolphus in the abbess’s cabinet (English “closet”; small, private room).²⁹

We need to imagine the time before Perrault’s versions triumphed and before they and abbreviated versions of the women’s tales came to be widely sold in England as chapbooks and corrupt collections, as d’Aulnoy’s were as Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales (1776 and many subsequent editions).³⁰ The third edition of Perrault’s tales in English was not needed until 1741, and the seventh was not until 1796. Specialists are correcting history; Jack Zipes’s anthology Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989) prints ten of Perrault’s and fifteen of d’Aulnoy’s tales, giving them, respectively, 53 and 299 pages. D’Aulnoy is part of the history of the novel, and Perrault, although some of his tales are like d’Aulnoy’s, found a place in the canon of what the British called nursery tales, the stories allegedly told by old women and nannies that terrified little children and lingered in the mind. As Hannah Cowley had the hero of one of her plays say, “The tales … that did awe / My infancy, all rush upon my mind, / And, spite of haughty reason, make it shrink.”³¹ In “Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales: Notes on Canon Formation,” Elizabeth Harries describes the propagation of the nostalgic myth of fairy tales preserved from the oral with “the flavor and purity of the true folktale.” She quotes critics who complain about the conteuses: “They made them so long, and the style so sophisticated, that children themselves would have been bored.” The canon, she says, was built on what the Grimms wanted fairy tales to be: “simple, ‘naive,’ economical, a reflection of their ideas about the folk, and appropriate for the social education of children.”³² This conception of the genre is constantly reinforced now in Disney films and children’s books. Jack Zipes points out that the Grimms may have omitted some tales because they were “too much within the French literary tradition or too commonly known as a literary tale to be considered a ‘true’ folk tale.”³³ Either category would have worked against d’Aulnoy. Zipes describes Disney’s Puss in Boots as “an attack on the literary tradition of the fairy tale” (190–91), a strong indication of the loss of favor for d’Aulnoy-style tales.

Many of d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales were literary creations, and everything about them drew their readers into an elegant, magic world.³⁴ D’Aulnoy plays extravagantly with the marvelous. Lewis Seifert explains,

In several respects, the marvelous employed by the conte de fées resembles that proposed by theoreticians of the merveilleux chrétien. Like the Christian epics, the vogue of fairy tales is a recognition and exploitation of a culturally specific type of marvelous. … Furthermore, both fairy-tale and Christian epic forms of the marvelous depict literal (rather than allegorical) supernatural characters and events. And in both cases, this emphatic use of the merveilleux strains and often transgresses the generally accepted bounds of vraisemblance.³⁵

Seifert goes on to point out that, unlike the French fairy tales, Christian writers carefully contained their inclusion of the supernatural and concluded texts with verisimilitude. Rowe’s character Rosalinda writes of the magic of staying awake when all of “the calm creation seems lull’d in a peaceful slumber; except elves and fairies” (3:127). She relates how the dairy maids and other servants have led her to fairy circles, and her reaction is in line with the connection Seifert makes: “I am no great infidel, some times I believe, and always wish the pretty stories they tell me were true; but I dare not object against any of those relations, for fear of being thought a heathen by the whole village” (3:127, emphasis mine). In her own letters, she had written to Hertford, “If there are fairies, (as I am not such an infidel as to deny) they are certainly very happy beings, and possess’d of a great many privileges which unhappy mortals want” (Misc. Works, 2:69). An interesting analysis of the appeal of Young’s Night Thoughts suggests an affinity with Rowe’s sensibility and the style of some of d’Aulnoy’s tales. John Louis Kind describes Young’s Night Thoughts as having “the chaotic preponderance of the imagination, and the implicit acceptance of the mysterious and marvellous.”³⁶ Comparisons of motifs make the contrasts between kinds of tales stark, as Harries demonstrates with Perrault’s “Cendrillon” and d’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cendron” (“The Story of Finetta the Cinder-Girl”). She points out d’Aulnoy’s much greater development of psychological interest, telling use of contemporary detail, and elaborate descriptions intended to be enjoyed for themselves as well as for what they reveal about character.³⁷ An obvious difference is the treatment of women. Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood climbs into bed naked with the wolf, the moral at the end styles all men wolves, and, as Elizabeth Marshall says, “Perrault’s victim possesses a female body responsible for its own violation.”³⁸

The first English publication of The History of Adolphus, Prince of Russia; and the princess of happiness was styled as “By a person of quality,” and the title page associated it with love poetry and wit. With Adolphus, this book, actually a collection, included poems by the youthful George Granville, who was already known for his courtship poems to the mythical Myra; John Howe, one of the best-known rakes in Charles II’s court; and Aphra Behn, as well as a poetic exchange between the playwright George Etherege and the Earl of Mulgrave with John Dryden’s “Answer.”³⁹ Two of the poems by Behn came from papers she left at her death, one continuing a lover’s Dialogue for the Entertainment at Court, and the four others from The Lover’s Watch: Or the Art of Making Love, a set of letters describing the experience of romantic love, one for each of the twenty-four hours in a day, from Iris in the country to Damon at court.⁴⁰ They include Advice for a Lover, On a Lover beginning to Love, and On Jealousy. The obviously coterie translation included references to other playwrights, including Nathaniel Lee, and witty jokes typical of their circle enlivened the translation, as when the narrator remarks that the mother of winds “(like all other old Women) was not to be interrupted” (7). Highlighting the coterie nature of the collection are Edmund Waller’s response to one of Granville’s poems; a witty six-line tribute to Behn comparing her to Diana, Cybell, and Pallas Athene by Granville; and libertine freedoms with d’Aulnoy’s text, such as Zephyr’s description of his time with the Princess: “I peep … under a Petticoat, I see all, and I feel all, I please my self where I will, and with what I will” (11). Published as an elegant folio as well as an octavo edition and sold “near” Stationers Hall, its prestigious presentation associated it with a line of high-culture fairy stories such as Faerie Queene and Midsummer Night’s Dream and with the fairy poetry enjoyed at the French court.⁴¹ It is also an example of the fairy tales as pallets for the imagination and continued coterie participation.

Rowe’s Fairy Tales

The plot of Isle of Happiness is leisurely and each section carefully elaborated. Prince Adolphus of Russia (then an exotic, intriguing country) becomes lost on a hunting chase and is caught in a violent night storm. He takes refuge in the cave of Eolus, God of the Winds. Zephyrus, the West Wind, describes the Island of Happiness from which he has just returned and agrees to take the prince there. Adolphus and the princess are charmed with each other and live an idyllic life together “inebrietated [sic] with Pleasures” (190). However, after a magic three hundred years in the princess’s kingdom, he feels he must attempt to fulfill his ambition to “perform great Actions” and attain fame.⁴² The princess tries to dissuade him but finally gives him a magic horse and warns him not to dismount; Time, however, disguises himself as a poor driver trapped by his overturned cart. When the prince dismounts to help him, Time springs up and beats him to death. Zephyrus brings his body back to the princess’s grotto. She closes her gates forever, and her story teaches the world that happiness is impossible because of mankind’s ambition and restlessness (195–96).

The sharp contrast between the prince’s and the princess’s sense of time and value are part of the narration, but they come fully to attention in the tragic conclusion. At the beginning, after falling asleep from fatigue on the island, the prince awakens, “much vex’d he had lost so much time in vain” (186), and, after discovering he has been on the island for three hundred years, he exclaims, “How must the World stand by this time?” “Who will know me?” “My Dominions are, doubtless, fal’n into the Hands of some strange Family?” She asks a profound question: “What is it you repine at?” (191). Expressing the values of earth, he responds, “I should perhaps have perform’d such great Actions as would have render’d my Name famous for ever to Posterity; I can’t without shame, see my Courage to lie dormant, and my Name buried in Oblivion” (192). The princess reasons with him and cries, but he “could not forbear upbraiding himself for having spent so much time with a Mistress without any thing that might raise his Name among the Rank of the Great Heroes” (192). He finally uses the argument that several of d’Aulnoy’s heroes do, that “Glorious Actions” will make him more worthy of her (193). Condemnation of ambition is common in the century, and the women’s tales associate it with masculinity. Hertford’s Inkle is strikingly similar to the Prince:

Reflecting now upon the time he past,
Deep melancholy all his thoughts o’ercast,
“Was it for this, said he, I cross’d the Main
Only a doating Virgin’s heart to gain?
I needed not for such a prize to roam,
There are a thousand doating maids at home.⁴³

He sells Yarico, raising the price when he discovers she is pregnant, for investment capital. Crass ambition has consumed Rowe’s Philander, who has attained a “splendid post in the government” and always been successful in work and love. “Ambition took full possession of my soul,” he writes to his friend. He has lost his happiness and his ability to enjoy both nature and society. As for Adolphus, ambition seems the road to destruction, but an illness and a retreat save Philander. Finding a natural paradise of uncultivated woods and meadows, he also finds God and contentment. The letter ends with a poem praising God: “I hear him, I perceive him all around; / In nature’s lovely and unblemish’d face, / With joy, his sacred lineaments I trace” (Letters, 1:59–64).

Most fairy tales manipulate senses of time and depend upon readers’ imaginations to fill in the experiences during periods when time stands still. Some sections have elaborate detail in setting and plot. The prince’s bravery, his struggle at the beginning of the tale to find shelter after becoming lost in the forest, his introduction into the cave, and the discourse styles of the winds and their grandmother are as elaborate as the core of the tale. The grandmother calls Zephyrus “you little Libertine,” and Zephyrus describes how he “play’d all round about [the princess], and I now and then gently lifted up her Veil” (180–81). Similarly, the thoughts and movements of Rowe’s characters are traced in detail, but then, just as with the prince and princess, periods of peace and happiness pass in a few sentences. Some of Rowe’s characters’ virtuous decisions are hard-won and sometimes won again in the face of repeated temptation, but the formulaic nature of the physical movement and the readers’ familiarity with, for instance, a long, arduous walk down poor roads allows the compression of parts of the narrative.

Settings in the fairy tales always include exterior and interior scenes that are luxurious, elegant, and, above all, aesthetic. The first description of the garden includes beautiful sounds and scents as well as sights, and the palace walls are of diamonds with precious stones for wainscoting. The tale assumes readers’ familiarity with Apuleius’s story of Psyche and with Tasso’s of Armida, whom the princess resembles (in Jerusalem Delivered). Notably, like d’Aulnoy’s Adolphus, both of these were interpolated tales. She also builds in prefigurings that in retrospect or second reading become clear and give pleasure to the reader. A song the prince hears has the refrain “Time brings every thing to pass” and a line promising, “if your cruel Destiny shortens your happy Moments, you must hope for fair Weather” (187). The moral at the end is “Time brings every thing to pass, and that there is no Felicity in its full Persec[u]tion” (196). It has allegorical resonance, as Zephyrus tells the prince before he takes him to the Island of Happiness: “tho’ every one goes in quest of it; for such is the Fate of Mankind, that they are not able to find it out … and some flatter themselves to be there, because they are cast sometimes into some neighbouring Ports, where they enjoy the Fruits of Calm and Tranquillity” (181). In the male mind, immortality comes from great deeds worthy of being recorded in history; in the princess’s world, they already have immortality.

Fairy tales obviously create an alternate world, but for the women who write them they become an elsewhere, a place of freedom from the limitations of imposed gender identity, conduct, and even thought. Throughout her life, Rowe enjoyed imagining various kinds of other worlds, often with considerable material detail. Some in fiction and personal letters are pastoral, while others stretch into the realm of pure imagination. For instance, Junius in Friendship in Death reports that “the unlimited Creator had made and peopled millions of glorious Worlds” and that they are enchanted, making fables and fairy scenes “real” (16–17). A letter Elizabeth Montagu once wrote to Elizabeth Carter captures the concept of elsewhere: “My imagination … oft mounts aloft, rises into the Regions of pure space, & without lett or impedement bears me to your fireside, where you set me in your easy chair, & we talk and reason … of high and important matters.”⁴⁴ Arabella in Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague refers to Canada as fairy ground and describes it as this kind of elsewhere: “I am delighted with the idea of revisiting dear England … : yet I feel a regret, which I had no idea I should have felt, at leaving the scenes of a thousand past pleasures; the murmuring rivulets to which Emily and I have sat listening, the sweet woods where I have walked with my little circle of friends.”⁴⁵

By contrasting these elsewhere spaces to the ordinary world and the society in which they lived and by peopling them with like-minded individuals, these authors created islands—islands of happiness and freedom. When d’Aulnoy and Rowe create such conversations on the isles of happiness, they never provide specific dialogue but rather a fantasy of perfect harmony and communication. They allow characters and readers to glide smoothly from the world they know to the utopia of freedom, communication, and perfect harmony. A. S. Byatt wrote, “My own fairy stories are written primarily for the pleasure of entering that other world, a world of imaginary apples and forest paths, greener and darker than any encountered in everyday life, a world of powerful beasts and satisfactory endings.”⁴⁶ Fairy tales like these give permission for kinds of stories and endings that join women’s fictions in imagining alternate worlds but in less threatening, perhaps more liberating ways. One fairy tale explained, “Fairy Land is neither a continent nor an island; and yet is both, or either; it exists in the air, at the distance of about five feet and a half or six feet at most from the surface of this earth which we inhabit; and is of all other countries the most agreeable.” Like Rowe’s spirits, “the inhabitants of this country frequently condescend to visit mortals,” and, as with Heaven, “whenever any man can so far divest himself of the gross incumbrance of human nature, as to take a flight to these sublime regions, he is sure to meet with an agreeable reception.”⁴⁷

As in many fairy tales, contentment, virtue, and harmony with a beautiful setting contrast to city and court lifestyles and ambitions. Men are admitted into a woman’s magic world of tranquillity, erudition, and beauty. The rhythm is replicated in d’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s stories. Narration gives way to a sense of time standing still, of contentment and yet of anticipation, and then the magic suspension of time gives way to the imposition of ordinary time. Time, selfhood, and then love become intertwined thematic interests. Adolphus says, “When I consult my Heart, and think of the satisfaction I feel within my self, I am almost apt to believe, I have not been here above a Week” (191). “Satisfaction … within my self”—alone or in company, Rowe’s characters, too, experience this suspension of time and restraint.

When Hypolitus tells his tale, he chooses one “not unlike one of the old Tales of the Fairesses” (176), “un conte approchant de ceux des Fées,” and he is trying to gain admission to a convent, a female world. Because of his tale, he succeeds, and he and Julie have months of tranquil happiness. Similarly, in the tale, Prince Adolphus enters the princess’s kingdom and, temporarily, her state of mind. In the happy fairy tales, this is the norm, as Rowe’s will demonstrate. The prince is charming, eloquent, and, as time passes, shares his education with her. Bakhtin insisted that the test of a hero was his discourse, and in some of the tales and especially in the frames for them, d’Aulnoy applies this standard.⁴⁸ Her narratives were part of an aristocratic culture, and when characters like Hypolitus are judged worthy and given free access to the community as he is by his tale, d’Aulnoy is positioning her tales by this Bakhtinian standard and, of course, within the social and literary values of her circle.

Among Rowe’s true fairy tales are the stories of Rosalinda, of Bellamour and Melissa, of Melinda, and of Silviana. Although Hertford may have collaborated with Rowe throughout the Letters, the Bellamour story is believed to have been written by her. “Six Letters from Laura to Aurelia” concludes the last volume and brings together the themes of the earlier tales. Robert Adams Day rightly argues that it turns “the miscellany of short stories in letters … another way.”⁴⁹ As is typical of the second-wave fairy tales, folkloric borrowings and styles are rarely deployed, and the genre has moved decidedly away from the romans héroique that strongly marks many of d’Aulnoy’s tales. A wide variety of literary devices, including satire, parody, and realism, are used in stories that are far more heterogeneous in content and function.⁵⁰ Interestingly, the first developed fairy tale begins with the last letter in Letters on Various Occasions, the book that would become the first volume of Letters Moral and Entertaining. Of all the tales, this one has both the most magic detail and the most economic specificity, both defining characteristics of fairy tales. It has added interest because it is collaborative and contributes to our understanding of how women writers worked.

Hertford seems to have suspected that Rowe was the author of Friendship in Death, but Rowe would not admit it. When her authorship was known, Hertford felt betrayed and even refused to accept letters from her. The outcome of the reconciliation was the more collaborative first volume of Letters. To which is Added Ten Letters by Another Hand (1729).⁵¹ Prefacing these ten letters are eight “Letters to Cleora,” the ones revised from Rowe’s actual letters to Hertford. The final ten have been, therefore, attributed to Hertford, including the beginning of the story of Bellamour and the cultured ladies. The first part of this story, the letter with the description of the house and the ladies’ occupations, is probably collaborative with rather than by Hertford, and the second part, the one about money, is attributed to Hertford by Bigold. Single authorship of eighteenth-century texts has always seemed overstated to me, and I believe the letter collaborative. Their story ends the volume, and readers’ curiosity is not satisfied until the conclusion in the middle of the second part of Letters.

In this collaborative fairy tale, although Bellamour is on his own property, he comes upon “the most beautiful valley imaginable” and in it an unknown cottage whose interior is in complete contrast to its unimposing exterior. As is typical in the literary tales, Rowe lingers over descriptions. Bellamour has difficulty descending a steep hill, finds a beautiful plain, names the trees, and follows a river before reaching the neat little house with its open wicket (Letters, 1:131–33). Since he assumes that no “persons of distinction” live there, he just walks in—all the way upstairs, where he opens a door and finds a mother reading to two beautiful daughters who are wearing white and embroidering flowers on white silk. In a suggestive parallel, Prince Adolphus uses a magic cloak that makes him invisible to gain access to Princess Felicity’s private apartments in d’Aulnoy’s Isle of Happiness. He walks through them admiring the rooms and groups of nymphs and their music. The house in Rowe’s fiction is a magic kingdom filled with cultural articles, such as a harpsichord, globes and folios of maps, fine furniture, and books on topics such as history, divinity, travel, and opera music. Basins of flowers contribute to an ambiance that leads him to observe, “I began to fancy my self in an enchanted habitation” (Letters, 1:134).

Improbably, the family is neither angry nor frightened at the intrusion; in contrast, the princess mistakes Adolphus for a beautiful bird, a kind that would make a “glorious Shew” like peacocks in her garden (189). Although men can be threatening in Rowe’s stories, in d’Aulnoy’s they often seem almost of a different species. Over several letters scattered in volumes 2 and 3 Rowe’s stories of the sisters Rosella and Melissa and the gentle men who love and respect them unfold. In many ways Bellamour’s story is an archetypal fairy tale. Fathers are often problems, especially where money is concerned. They are either greedy and likely to rush into marriage, as in d’Aulnoy’s “The Tale of Graciosa, and Prince Percinet,” or, as in this story, irresponsible and profligate. Rosella’s and Melissa’s father died in debt, and his family refused to help the widow and children. The exemplary widow, Honoria, has paid the debts and lives frugally but beautifully. Thus, like many of the damsels in fairy tales, they are distressed and appear of a lower class than any prince (like Bellamour) who may appear. Moreover, Honoria refuses to let Rosella marry Alphonso because he is of a lower class and from a “wicked” family. In amatory tales, fathers tend to be the obstacles, but in fairy tales, as in this story, mothers and stepmothers often take this narrative place while fathers are neglectful, immature, or exercise bad judgment.

Bellamour cannot forget Melissa, although her dowry is only £3000, and he has £4000 per year and is “in the gayest bloom of life” (Letters, 2:68–69). Four years later, he decides to propose, to give her dowry to her mother, and to settle on Melissa £1000 per year rent-charge for her life “in case she should survive me” (2:69). In the meantime, Alphonso has inherited fortunes from his penitent father and a clergyman, and he and Rosella marry. From the clergyman he received “his estate, which was about an hundred and eighty pounds a year; and two thousand pounds in Money; which, added to about two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and some money which his father left him, makes their fortune very easy” (2:71–72). Although emphasis is usually on the happily-ever-after union, fairy tales just as consistently end with the sudden acquisition of over-the-top wealth. The symbolic adoption by the clergyman compensates for the “wicked family,” and a magic, happy ending results for both men and the daughters.

In collected volumes of d’Aulnoy’s tales, the stories were continued from volume to volume, as they are in The History of the New Gentleman-Citizen in A Collection of Novels and Tales of the Fairies (3 vols., 1728). Highly intertextual, as d’Aulnoy’s were, Rowe includes references to Henry Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia (1639), a Neoplatonic, pastoral play based on an episode in Sidney’s Arcadia; to Paris disguised as a shepherd on Mount Ida (then married to a nymph); to Pope’s Messiah; to various poems by Milton; and to Count Gabilis (1680), the English translation of Comte De Gabalis (1670), the highly popular collection of five discourses between the count and a priest by Abbé Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars (it has been described as reading like a fairy tale, and one discourse is styled in the 1714 English edition as “An Account of the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits, viz. Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes, and Demons”).⁵² With its persecuted, disguised heroine and romantic, improbably happy ending, it is also highly imitative of fairy tales. Rowe’s story of Rosalinda is also told over several letters and in two different volumes of Letters. Letter 2 in the third part is attributed largely to Hertford by Bigold. Rosalinda runs away from the father who would marry her to “a bigoted Papist” and becomes an upper servant.⁵³ She trades her brocades, jewels, and “fine China on an Indian cabinet” for “flowers in my bosom” and helping her mistress arrange “a set of Delft dishes on a free-stone chimney-piece” (Letters, 2:12–13). The mistress treats Rosalinda like a sister as they chat and decorate the house, and her only work is with her needle in “some verdant retreat.” She encounters a “gentle youth” in an “Arcadian” setting reading Pastor Fido: “you would believe him some poetical form: he is so elegant, so beautiful” (2:8). This tale is also economically specific. This “prince” is from a noble family, one “remarkable for heroes and beauties,” but his extravagant ancestors have reduced the estate to a mere two to three hundred pounds a year.

The “Arcadian” or pastoral settings do not confine the characters to a mythic past but enhance both the aesthetic and spiritual elements that constitute the harmony of the created lifestyle. Hers is a powerful, revisionary use of these heavily allusive, respected value-carriers to reinforce an ideology. A letter from a physician illustrates the effect of the blending of elements. The writer describes himself as in a “visionary temper”:

I had wander’d about a mile from the Earl of *****’s gardens and park, ’till I enter’d a winding valley, green and flowery as the Elysian fields; a silver stream ran murmuring along the middle, and willows in equal order adorn’d the banks: It was not perfect nature, something of art appear’d. … I … lost myself in a pleasing contemplation, ’till the sight of the most charming object I ever beheld, surpriz’d me: She seem’d

Fairer than feign’d of old, or fabled since,

Of fairy-damsels, met in forest wide. —Milton

Her shape and features were perfectly regular. … But I might as well paint virtue or harmony, as describe the graces of her mein and aspect. … She advanc’d ’till she came near the arbour that conceal’d me, and then seating herself on the bank of the river, in a pensive posture, leaning her cheek on her hand, white as the new fallen snow, with a soft and graceful accent, she repeated … lines out of Sir Richard Blackmore’s fine poem on the creation. …

… a spruce footman came to tell her supper was ready, and her father waited for her: She rose immediately, and follow’d the man. (Letters, 1:66–67)

In this magic scene, the setting, the appearance of the beautiful woman, quotations from elite poetry referring to other worlds, and his sensibility, which colors and transmits the encounter, turn her into a damsel from a fairy tale. She actualizes the blend of the aesthetic, spiritual, and pastoral that creates the aura and ambiance of this idealized state of mind and lifestyle.

As is common, the forest and nature provide a place of enchantment and re-enchantment. As Sylvia Bowerbank remarks, “The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging.” She continues by describing the longing for re-enchantment, for reformulating harmony,⁵⁴ and as Rowe creates fairy tales she actualizes a means of re-enchantment. She uses the same technique for some of the descriptions of Heaven. In the second letter in Friendship in Death, Alamont celebrates Heaven as “this fair, this fragrant, this enchanting Land” with “delectable Vales and flow’ry Lawns, the Myrtle Shades and rosy Bowers, the bright Cascades and chrystal Rivulets rolling over orient Pearls and Sands of Gold … they break with rapid Force through arching Rocks of Diamond and Purple Amethist” (7–8). The gradual introduction of crystal, pearls, gold, diamonds, and amethysts is clever and acts to transmit the reader from lawns and bowers to the aesthetics of Heaven, to make the worlds inseparable and continuous. Peter Walmsley refers to such scenes as “intensified pastoral” that make Heaven “imaginatively available.”⁵⁵

As John Brewer says, “aestheticizing nature and finding personal solace in rural life” created a countryside that “could be a place of arcadian rest, … the home of social harmony … , a site of aesthetic pleasure, or a place in which to realize oneself through confronting ‘nature.’ ”⁵⁶ Again, the elements of pastoral, nature, self-realization, sensibility, and aesthetics are an inseparable blend. Rowe is an early transmitter of what came to be an understanding of sensibility as an amalgamation. As Hannah More explains,

Sweet Sensibility! thou keen delight!
Thou hasty moral! sudden sense of right!

Thou untaught goodness! Virtue’s precious seed!
Thou sweet precursor of the gen’rous deed!
Beauty’s quick relish! Reason’s radiant morn.⁵⁷

As in fairyland, this is a world where sensuous pleasure, all the pleasures of the senses, is honored. The countryside as “pastoralized aesthetic object” is critical to creating this effect.⁵⁸ In turn, this leads to release of greater sensibility in the characters, a characteristic of d’Aulnoy’s tales with pastoral elements, which critics say have protagonists with more sensibility and also more devotion to virtue.⁵⁹ As Margaret Doody notes, the fairy world is associated with water and air, “those two elusive elements”⁶⁰ and the elements most associated with God and with life. Rosalinda describes the setting of the farmhouse as bringing together “Mr. Thomson’s Spring and Summer Seasons” in one “enchanting prospect,” and, as with Philander, she finds the nature of God revealed in the setting. Once married, she describes the prospect on one side of the country house: “I fancy myself in Fairy-land; it looks all like the effect of enchantment, and beyond human contrivance” (Letters, 3:134). A cultured, educated woman, she spontaneously recites part of Milton’s Morning Hymn in Italian (Letters, 2:7 from Paradise Lost, book 5, lines 153–56), and one of the letters closes with a poem she is portrayed as composing, A Pastoral. Henry and Lucy, a skillful dialogue in heroic couplets. Intertextuality is essential to the setting and creates the register. She gives us what McKeon has styled the lasting pastoral preoccupation: “the dream of a direct apprehension of nature” and an awareness that she is giving us an imaginative composition of nature and humankind dwelling in it.⁶¹

Addison wrote, “In Courts and Cities we are entertained with the Works of Men, in the Country with those of God” (Spectator, 23 August 1712, 4:143–44). Michael McKeon has argued that pastoral “works both to affirm and to suspend such oppositions” and says that most poets of the eighteenth century “self-consciously determined to disclose the underlying ‘reality’ of the contemporary English countryside.”⁶² Rowe might have agreed with Addison, and the kinds of economics McKeon brings to the surface are present in her fairy tales. However, she embraces the artifice of pastoral aesthetic fairy tale, and her purpose is to suspend time. Pastoral becomes an ambiance suffusing settings not usually apprehended as pastoral. Because she found harmony and even identification among Heaven, beautiful settings, and the tranquil, virtuous life, she occasionally has characters create strikingly aesthetic settings in woman-centered homes. The stands holding basins of flowers, the decorated mantels, musical instruments, and polished tables create a signature ambiance of beauty and order. Such scenes are knitted from Rowe’s own life and aesthetic. Honored by a visit from Hertford, Rowe wrote of the preparations, “If you don’t come in a very little while there will be no laurels nor holly-oaks left in the country, for my waiting-gentlewoman has ingross’d them all to adorn her chimneys. … There is a cupola and arch’d windows.”⁶³

D’Aulnoy creates palace after palace composed of or encrusted with carbuncles, diamonds, and semi-precious stones; when Rowe writes a similar scene with the same stones, her referent is the Bible, as to Isaiah 54:11–12 (“Behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, / And lay thy foundations with sapphires. / And I will make thy windows of agates, / And thy gates of carbuncles”). As early as the fifth letter in Friendship, Rowe establishes a continuity between fairyland and the “millions of glorious Worlds” God made before the earth. Junius pauses in his “Tour of the Skies” and describes one of these worlds: “Whatever you have heard fabled of Fairy Scenes, of vocal Groves, and Palaces rising to Magick Sounds, is all real here” (17). In both cases, sumptuousness in such magnitude with these sources bestows a kind of authority and prestige on the texts and their authors. As Duggan demonstrated, an important relationship existed between the French fairy tales and opera, and tales including d’Aulnoy’s The Fair One with Golden Locks (La belle aux cheveux d’or) and her uses of images associated with Versailles replicated the atmosphere of opera.⁶⁴ Rowe’s Rosalinda describes herself “as fine as any shepherdess in an Opera” (2:8). The White Cat’s court offers theater, carousels, hunting, fireworks, ballet, and music as entertainment. The high-culture aesthetic survives in the ballet of Blue Bird made famous by Ballets Russes, John Ashbery’s “elegantly translated” The Story of the White Cat, and Errol Le Cain’s 1979 illustrations for The Story of the White Cat, described by David Blamires as “subtle in colouring, varied in mood and elegantly composed.”⁶⁵

Fiction of the first half of the century usually depicted true love with sexual attraction, as well as intellectual and temperamental harmony. Rowe’s tale includes the scene in which Rosalinda gazes on the sleeping Lucius, an echo of the scene in which Psyche spies upon her sleeping monster husband and discovers Cupid, a scene repeated in several of d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales.⁶⁶ Rowe’s narrative progresses to a representation of complete compatibility, the kind the princess and Adolphus had on the Isle. Rosalinda describes their “delicacy of thought,” modest reserve, and innocent delight in each other’s company. After marriage, they enjoy books, the beautiful gardens, charitable works, and evening prayers. Throughout these six letters, Rowe maintains the milieu of fairy tales. Rosalinda writes to her friends, “If he is, as you flatter me, some bright inhabitant of the air …” (Letters, 2:11). In spite of the concreteness of his fortune, there is always something magic about her unexpected encounters with him and about his person conveyed in phrases such as “inhabitant of the air” and “one of Count Gabalis’s Sylphs,” perhaps evidence of her reading d’Aulnoy. Then he inherits an additional £6,000 a year and a “noble seat.” Once married, Rosalinda continues to drift around the gardens, ornamenting the estate as it provides a beautiful setting for her, while her husband’s grandmother manages the stately home. In true fairy-tale style, he has believed her beneath him in rank, but she is an earl’s daughter and the rightful heir to £80,000. She hears that her father is pleased with her noble marriage and hopes for reconciliation. The “Papist” father, the escaping daughter, her disguised life, and the happy ending with augmented wealth are the conventions of fairy tales.

Specific economic details, while characteristic of the tales, are important bridges to the real world. Rosalinda tells us how Lucius budgets his annual income and includes the fact that she is given £1,000 pin money. In spite of his enormous wealth, Lucius, not a steward, is described as paying “his bills once a month with great exactness” (Letters, 3:134, misnumbered in text). Bordering on the ludicrous, this episode teaches a kind of middle-class morality in that the concern is for “honest tradesmen.” Rowe is one of the first fiction writers to use the magic restorative of money from a returning merchant. This repair of fortune and status is a modern conversion of the kinds of restoration found in d’Aulnoy’s Fair One with Golden Locks (by accidental poisoning of a king) and The Story of the White Cat (she owns enough kingdoms to provide one for everyone). Karen Rowe has identified the fact that in the fairy tales we know best, women gain wealth and status only through marriage, which she sees as reinforcing the subordination of women. D’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s tales are obvious exceptions, and Rowe has her heroines gain wealth in a variety of ways. That alone is liberating—they have it, inherit it, or marry it, and some have quite original twists. In the fairy tale of Melinda, the heroine has lost her money in the South Sea Bubble. Tired of living in her brother’s raucous house, she goes to work disguised as a servant. She had fallen in love with a man she saw at the theatre, but, because of “the scandal of the house” where she lived with her brother, he would not court her. He has become a rich East India merchant and married the woman for whom she works; they recognize each other. He has become a model benefactor, and his flame for her has died. He finally goes to her, tells her that he admires her escape from the licentious place in which she was living, gives her £10,000 in bank bills, and returns to sea. The wife invites Melinda to stay with her, and she gratefully accepts. The happy ending to this story, then, is the restoration of Melinda’s fortune and a union of two women of harmonious temper and cultivated minds.

In a kind of Cinderella story, Silviana, daughter of a country clergyman with a “sprightly temper,” inherits £20,000 from an uncle who had been a Turkey merchant (Letters, 3:168–76). Before that, she has left her sisters to help her mother and spends her time with Lady Worthy’s youngest daughter reading plays and novels. The advance in fortune leads to an invitation to be painted as a nymph in Lady Worthy’s history painting. This picture attracts Lord ——, and they marry. Silviana is a typical heroine in that she is an avid reader and refers easily to classical literature, in this case Ovid’s Oenone, a nymph on Mount Ida. Silviana’s story comes near the end of volume 3, and the voice is more distinctive. It includes a pastoral interlude and some of the best satire in the Letters. Moreover, the tale’s subject is the contrast between her happy life, unmarried and married, in the country and her “illustrious bondage” in the city. In contrast, Laura, the last heroine in the text, misses the city and begs her correspondent Aurelia to tell her everything “the dear, bewitching, busy world is doing” (Letters, 3:223).

Rowe had remarked in her dedication that “there is at least as much Probability in this Scheme [letters from the dead to the living], as in that of the Fairy Tales, which however Visionary, are some of them Moral, and Entertaining.” Adding the word “visionary” to the standard invocation of moral (instruction) and entertaining (delight) connoted both “imaginative” and “prophetic.” Therefore, at the time, it fit both the fairy tales and Rowe’s fictions, especially as they developed in the next three volumes of her Letters. Rowe carries over the allusion to fairy tales from her dedication into the first letter in Friendship in Death. In it the Earl of R— is “singing an Idle Song you had got out of the FAIRY TALES,” perhaps “Time brings everything to pass” from Adolphus.⁶⁷ Rowe establishes the mode of fairy tales with the evening setting and the mood of the earl, who enters the garden “with a careless incredulous Air.” Rather than being an unbeliever or skeptic, he has an “air” of being so. The narrator remarks tartly, “By the Gayety of your Temper you seem’d pleas’d, my Lord, with a new Proof against a Future Life, and happy to find yourself (as you concluded) on a level with the Beasts that perish” (2). Rowe contrasts him (and beasts) to those who already believe or can be “impressed” with “the Notion of the Soul’s Immortality,” thereby illustrating the goals of her dedication and preface again within the tale. As in Rosalinda’s humoring the dairy maids, there is no tension between the possibility of fairies and the reality of spirits. In Letter 5, Junius describes the many worlds “the Creator” had “peopled,” and the description is highly similar to many of d’Aulnoy’s scenes unfolding before her travelers:

Whatever you have heard fabled of Fairy Scenes, of vocal Groves, and Palaces rising to Magick Sounds, is all real here. … I have in an Instant seen Palaces ascend to a majestic Height, sparkling as the Stars, and transparent as the unclouded Æther. I might describe them like the courtly Prophet; Their Walls were fair Colours, their Foundation Saphire, the Windows of Agate, and the Gates of Carbuncle. (Friendship in Death, 17)

On the Isle of Happiness, the castle walls are diamond, and the princess’s throne is made of a single carbuncle stone, “brighter than the Sun itself” (188). The gates to d’Aulnoy’s White Cat’s palace are gold covered with carbuncles, and precious stones encrust the walls in both palaces (The Story of the White Cat). In other tales in the twenty letters in Friendship in Death, fairyland is described, and one spirit assumes the shape of a fairy in an attempt not to scare a mortal (35). Perhaps following Rowe, Eliza Tuite creates a sylph, “a mortal once,” as the voice and guiding spirit of her five poems “Written as a Sylph to a Young Lady.” The sylph begins by hoping that her shape will prevent raising “in thy mind involuntary fears” of a creature returned from the dead.

There was much in d’Aulnoy’s work that harmonizes with Rowe’s and her circle’s opinion about literature, aesthetics, and the use of time. D’Aulnoy would later publish three volumes of her devotional meditations and two paraphrases of Psalms, both genres in which Rowe published.⁶⁸ Even Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, from which d’Aulnoy drew ideas, was a favorite with Rowe. Among Rowe’s poems translating or adapting Tasso’s are The Story of Erminia. Translated from the seventh Book of Tasso’s Jerusalem, The Beginning of the Fourth Book of Tasso’s Jerusalem, A Description of the enchanted palace and garden of Armida (from the sixteenth book), The Description of the Drought (from the thirteenth book), and another part of the thirteenth book. Robert Adams Day has argued the important influence of d’Aulnoy’s Ingenious and Diverting Letters (1692) for epistolary fiction such as Rowe’s. Day calls d’Aulnoy’s one of the most popular models, describes the miscellaneous content, and identifies some of the texts “based on” it.⁶⁹

Just as d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales were highly original and filled with surprising plots, events, and conclusions, Rowe’s show her confidence and liberty with the form. She uses them for both grim and magic purposes. The little child whom Polidore discovers and hopes is a fairy or phantom turns out to be the daughter, the absolute image, of Aurelia, a ruined woman who had this child by her best friend’s husband. Most of the references to fairies are unlike this one. The earl’s song is one of several other allusions to fairy literature as part of the fashionable knowledge of the ton.⁷⁰ More commonly, Rowe refers to fairies as an enjoyable, imaginative part of bucolic settings. Rosalinda describes the early morning as the domain of elves and fairies and her husband’s seat as so exquisite that she fancies herself in “Fairy-land” (3:134). She says that a nurse in the family is “intimately acquainted … with these sprightly phantoms” and has led her to the beautiful circles where they dance. The dairy maids in the family also insist they have seen them, too, and Rosalinda concludes, “Some times I believe, and always wish the pretty stories they tell me were true” (3:127, 134). Her characters are open to such experiences and to finding fairy circles, as, for a moment, Laura in the last story in the collection believes she has (Letters, 3:235). Rowe provides these small, imaginative moments in a number of tales to please her readers but always privileges the rational, as gothic writers would later convert supernatural horror into explanations derived from human actions.⁷¹

The Fairy Way of Writing

Rowe’s fairy tales had influential differences from the amatory narratives written between 1685 and 1730. Although that true fairy tales almost invariably have happy endings seems like a minor detail, this fact empowered different themes and outcomes in Rowe’s fictions. Both kinds of fiction often begin with a heroine who is threatened by an authority figure and either immediately or later by a seducing or highly unattractive suitor. The restrictions and limitations on women’s actions, and therefore on the realization of their selfhoods, by fathers, brothers, and husbands is conventional. This is an important theme in d’Aulnoy’s tales and, in fact, is the plot of Hypolitus, in which Julie disguises herself as a lower-class woman and then a male pilgrim. Rowe’s Rosalinda and Melinda disguise themselves as lower-class women, and all of her heroines are threatened by evil or inadequate authority figures. By sabotaging attempts to situate the women by their rank, the disguised characters commit acts of anti-authoritarianism that oppose patriarchal praxis.

Amatory fiction sets up situations in which the powerless must outwit established authority, but the conclusions tend to prove that the women are, indeed, largely powerless. In contrast, in fairy tales the powerless escape or triumph over authority, as children, the poor, and the scorned do in the New Testament. In d’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s tales the women are courageous, daring, highly intelligent, and manage to establish power over themselves and others. D’Aulnoy’s Belle-Etoile, for instance, dresses as a knight, captures the green bird, and rescues her brothers, Chéri, and three hundred knights who have been frozen into statues shelved in crystal niches (The Story of the Princess Fair-Star, and Prince Chery). All of Rowe’s heroines are good and arrestingly beautiful, but she does not use the hierarchy of beauty to which feminists have objected⁷² to signal a hierarchy of virtue. Balancing the emphasis on beauty is that in fairy tales heroines take the initiative and never relinquish at least some degree of control over their destinies. Even Perrault’s Cinderella thinks of using a rat for a coachman and goes to check the trap. D’Aulnoy’s Belle-Belle goes to fight in her aged father’s place (The Story of Fortunio, Belle-Belle, ou le Chevalier Fortuné in The History of the New Gentleman-Citizen).

This courage and daring is frequently displayed in the kinds of calculated violations of convention that Jane Austen often portrayed. As Marina Warner says, “Fairy tale is essentially a moralizing form, often in deep disguise and often running against the grain of commonplace ethics.”⁷³ Rowe’s heroines often violate the expectations the culture had for women and, like Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, offer an alternative ethics. The moralistic Laura, for instance, defends and befriends Charlotte, the young girl her brother has brought to the country as his mistress. “Indeed she has no other refuge,” Laura explains, and she keeps Charlotte in her own apartment in the country house. Many women are generous, powerful, wise, and display self-possessed calm, as Rowe’s Laura and d’Aulnoy’s White Cat do. The sea captain’s wife confronted by a woman her husband admits to have once loved is another such example.

The number of women who escape repressive situations, situations that threaten their selfhood and moral aspirations, through disguise is striking. D’Aulnoy’s tend to be more dramatic. Aimée in The Orange Tree and its Beloved Bee hunts and feeds her cousin Aimé; she defeats Tourmentine while Aimé, who has been turned into the tree, is helpless. Women characters tend to remain active and courted; Aimé says his flowers can give her pleasure, and she chooses to enter one. Rowe’s Laura persuades her brother to release Charlotte and Charlotte’s uncle to take her in, both feats considered impossible at the beginning of the sequence of letters. D’Aulnoy’s Belle-Belle becomes a knight and restores a king’s lost wealth; many of the tales by all of the women interrogate class and gender. Belle-Belle, for instance, is the only one of her father’s three daughters who can pass as a knight because “social identity … [in] a gender-specific occupation is determined not only by appearances but also by actions.”⁷⁴ Rowe’s heroines are determined, daring, and resourceful. When these women are placed beside the heroines of other kinds of tales in which women go into solitary retreat, the degree to which they maintain autonomy and preservation of a lifestyle—interior and social—puts them in a special category. It is clear that Rowe’s theme of independence is more central in her work than in fiction by other women writers before and contemporaneous with her.

At this point I want to look at three original and influential ways that Rowe developed this theme. First, she asserts the individual rights of her heroines. Some critics of the French fairy tales have gone so far as to call the princesses “selfish,” and in them and Rowe’s heroines there is an unapologetic dedication to a multifaceted self-preservation. The novelists before Rowe depicted truly destitute women who struggled for food and shelter, and Ruth Perry has demonstrated the lingering importance of this theme in Novel Relations. Some were wanderers, actually genteel beggars, in foreign countries as Aubin’s Count Vinevil and Haywood’s Rash Resolve portray. Others were like some of Rowe’s minor characters such as Charlotte and Aurelia, “ruined,” disowned, and driven to sin if not crime for sustenance as Defoe’s Moll Flanders was. In harmony with the fairy-tale ambiance, the emphasis is not on the economic problem and the wandering. A variety of people help women find safe harbors, as a relation of her Protestant mother does Rosalinda and a former nursemaid does Melinda. What Day says about d’Aulnoy’s Histoire might be said about numerous midcentury novels, including such well-known novels as Haywood’s Miss Betsy Thoughtless: as wives, they become submissive, “constantly preoccupied with her reputation in the eyes of the world and with her duty to the institution of marriage, which takes no account of the character of the husband or of the treatment that as a wife she receives. Consequently, duty, le devoir, becomes a leitmotif of the text and we detect a growing apart, on the moral plane, of the lovers.”⁷⁵

This pattern is decidedly not true in Rowe’s tales, and she consistently argues that the woman’s first responsibility is to herself. Instead, what Hannon says of d’Aulnoy and her fairy-tale heroines is a better fit. They “forsake at once the conjugal house and the domesticated sensuality so widely evoked in the prescriptive literature on the nature of women.” D’Aulnoy’s “fabulous geographies forego husband, children, family, state, and even women’s celebrated chastity, in favor of a body in constant motion.” The mobile, domestic body changes into speaking and reasoning, as d’Aulnoy’s do into speaking and reasoning animals. “Aulnoy’s enchanted bodies become a theater for self-discovery as well as a conduit for knowledge. Because the world is explored and thus known through the ever-changing body, the latter plays an active role in the quest for knowledge and truth.”⁷⁶ In a less dramatic way, Rowe’s women are “ever-changing” and mobile; aristocratic daughter, disguised servants, subject of a history painting, leisured wife—roles, activities, and clothing shift. Silviana, for instance, is one day sitting as one of Diana’s virgin nymphs, then in a simple dress with her hair falling in its natural curls, and then adorned with fashionable clothes, jewelry, and an immense “head.”

The women characters are protecting their virtue, of course, but they also believe that they have the right to think, believe, and live with integrity. Rosalinda writes even after her marriage, “My hours are here at my own disposal, nor am I obliged to devote them to ceremony or vain amusements. I find myself under no necessity to court the impertinent or flatter the ambitious, nor to do a thousand unreasonable things” (3:129). One of the most original features of d’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s fairy tales are the ways women are able to audition men for roles in their lives. Even d’Aulnoy’s more violent and folkloric fairy tales turn on the heroine’s observing and testing her suitors. A letter from Rowe’s Albanus, which he says was intended to be a love letter, says that his lady has transformed him “from a libertine [to] regular and consistent; from a lover, you have metamorphos’d me into a reasonable creature” (1:87). Silviana, for instance, takes her time getting to know the lord in spite of being infatuated with him. “After I knew my Lord’s character,” she writes, “I had a sort of vanity in owning a sense of his merit.” That he spends a month after marriage in her home where “the scenes of low life were a diverting novelty to him” is further proof of his acceptability (Letters, 3:172). In a time when women writers were using the conclusions of prose fictions to demonstrate the implications of social practices and to emphasize that there were no satisfactory solutions to numerous situations, the fairy tale offered a fantasy of happy endings and a starkly contrasting world. In this world, women are too strong to be seduced and men are tested, sometimes at length. D’Aulnoy’s White Cat negotiates her marriage and guarantees her own dowry. As Michèle Farrell observes, she “acts as her own ambassador to represent her own desire,” and a consistent feature of d’Aulnoy’s “heroines is that they actively engage in the shaping of their destiny.”⁷⁷

Both Hypolitus and Adolphus must be accepted in a female space. Although the tests in fairy tales are sometimes reminiscent of trials of classical heroes, they are often based on things that have special meaning for the heroines and, therefore, are signs of understanding and compatibility. In The Fair One with Golden Locks, for instance, Avenant is sent to recover a beloved ring she lost in a river. Alphonso in Rowe’s story told by Bellamour is exiled, and his two-year virtuous life is the test that leads to marriage. He and Rosella will live in her home with her mother, and Melissa in the same story must be convinced that Bellamour’s home is close enough to her mother’s. Thus, the cultured, feminocentric world is preserved intact and the men are admitted on the women’s terms. When sophisticated kinds of compatibility are established, the woman admits the man into her life, and, more significantly, preserves her lifestyle, as Rosalinda does. If such harmony is not discovered, no union results. Rowe has Rosalinda describe the feeling of love as “something more than the tenderness of friendship, and less than the warmth and violence of passion; and seems like the dictates of guiltless nature” (Letters, 2:11). For Rowe’s women, as for the princess who compares Adolphus to peacocks to adorn a garden, the men they love are aesthetic objects. Their bodies are attractive and often repeatedly described, an effective way to incorporate the physical, sexual attraction the century advised for happy, lasting love.

Obviously, the fact that the women choose highlights the importance to women’s happiness of compatibility, inclination, and an affective dimension. Good fortune, virtue, and the appearance of an unusually sensitive hero bring about happy endings for the virtuous heroine whom circumstances have made miserable. In “Graciosa and Percinet,” a representative tale that can be related to Rowe’s stories, the virtuous, beautiful princess’s father, dazzled by a monstrous woman’s wealth, remarries and puts his daughter under her control. Graciosa, like the other fairy-tale heroines, is highly intelligent and has been tutored by “Learned Persons, who taught her all manner of Sciences [meaning “knowledge”].”⁷⁸ Significantly, trials imposed on Graciosa are passed on to Percinet, and Graciosa tests him in a variety of unusual ways. Respect and social forms are of prime importance. After Percinet keeps her from being flayed alive, she thanks him but asks him to leave “because she had often been told, that it was not decent for young Virgins to be alone with young Men.” He leaves. After each rescue, they discuss proper behavior, and she tells him that she wants time to confirm that he loves her “with a perfect Affection.”⁷⁹

Some of the women have already developed what might be called a lifestyle and personal philosophy, but as Rowe continued to write stories in this vein she increasingly depicts women developing them, as Laura does in the final series. She also shows the struggle to retain them in various settings as Silviana does when she is moved to London. Autonomy is of central importance. Rosalinda notes that her mistress allows her to choose her employment, and, in scenes of her minding the children, it is clear she is without supervision or instructions (2:5–7). Silviana is an especially interesting case as she represents the struggle for the kind of self-preservation Rowe is developing even as she attempts to conform to the expectations of a husband she loves. Rowe shows her bargaining to be allowed to read while her hairdresser spends two hours concocting an enormous “head” “with flowers, feathers, and bits of ribbon” (3:175). Silviana is “inclined to cry” and deeply regrets the loss of her “harmless freedom.” Her tales define and illustrate a new, “accomplished” woman whose private and social conduct is a civilizing model that becomes normative because it posits that such women have attained woman’s “natural” nature.

In the construction of the minds of the women, Rowe includes varying amounts of explicit religion. It is more exact to say that it is an important part of the constructed consciousness rather than the raison d’etre of the story. The mise en abyme so integral to the French fairy tales develops into a philosophy that seems to anticipate Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence. … ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky.’ Both of these also mean ‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men’s being with one another.’ ”⁸⁰ In the course of her tales, Rowe comes to portray and advocate this state of being. Rosalinda expresses it, and Laura slowly and somewhat painfully develops it. One of the most original of her characters, Laura opens her story with a riff:

My brother brought me here to see a country seat he has lately purchased: He would fain persuade me ’tis finely situated; but I should think it more finely situated in the Mall, or even in Cheapside. … Indeed I hardly know where we are, only that it is at a dreadful distance from the theatre royal in Drury-Lane, from the opera, from the masquerade. …

… we are certainly at the ends of the earth, on the borders of the continent, the limits of the habitable globe, under the polar star, among wild people and savages … nor could I forbear asking my brother, if we were to travel by dry land to the Antipodes. …

The Country is my aversion, I hate trees and hedges, steep hills, and silent valleys … the smell of violets gives me the hystericks; fresh air murders me. (Letters, 3:224).

Later she says that she has “grown fond of the country, and have acquired a relish for its harmless delights: I can … listen with great attention to a purling stream” (3:234). The descriptions of nature in this series mingle more artifice and uncultivated nature. The hermit has created an arbor of flowers “twisted together with a sort of elegant disorder” on a mound with turf steps and has hung gilt cages of singing birds on the lower branches of elm trees. In the last scene, Rowe anticipates Heidegger’s conception, as Laura goes to a retreat “where art and luxurious nature displayed their various beauties” and “Nature seemed animated with a conscious joy” (Letters, 3:249).

This letter brings Rowe’s four volumes of prose full circle, as Philocles appears and speaks to her. The harmony between people, between Laura and nature, between art and nature, and between this world and the eternal is complete, somehow natural and evolved. Again, there are parallels to d’Aulnoy’s work; Hannon argues that her “metamorphosed characters seem to look back towards a pre-Cartesian worldview wherein the boundaries between self and universe, human and natural, are less clearly drawn.”⁸¹ In various ways, both writers collapse the boundaries between humankind and nature and between spaces.

Another somewhat unexpected effect is the license this harmony gives to sensuality. The feel of a breeze on skin, the sounds of birds, and the smell of flowers such as jasmine, woodbine, and roses noted for their rich aroma bring Rowe’s characters great pleasure and a sense of being part of the natural world. One of the richest sensual descriptions in d’Aulnoy’s tales is of fruit delivered by the fairies to the queen in The Story of the White Cat: “abricots, pêches pavis, brugnons, cerises, prunes, poires, bigarreaux, melons, muscats, pommes, oranges, citrons, groseilles, fraises, framboises. …”⁸² This technique of making lists and piling up natural images underscores the beauty and bounty of the earth but also the sensuality of the women.

The second influential way in which Rowe developed the theme of independence is that she does not insist on heterosexual love as the basis of happiness and marriage as closure. Another means of encouraging a sense of personal autonomy that flies in the face of the strong social constraints of the time is the fact that the women are not reintegrated into the family or social structure at the conclusions. In spite of Rosalinda’s father’s change of heart because of her favorable marriage, no reconciliation is described in the narrative. Even in these few tales, the conclusions inscribe several possibilities for the happy life. Melinda finds a home with the sea captain’s wife; Laura seems committed at least temporarily to a single life with her primary commitment to “refined and enlarged” “notions of happiness” (Letters, 3:251). Rosalinda’s and Melissa’s marriages are parallel to d’Aulnoy’s The Story of the Pidgeon and the Dove (Le Pigeon et la colombe), which ends with the couple choosing to remain as pigeon and dove free to live in beautiful solitude and avoid the duties of the court.

The explorations of abuses of power and a woman’s need to regard men warily come together in marriage plots in Rowe’s fiction. The forced marriage becomes a major plot device that portrays an actual threat to women and often symbolizes tyrannical exercise of power, as Rosalinda’s story does. Years before this was a major theme in the novel, d’Aulnoy had written as the moral to The Blue Bird, “Doubtless the Old Sow did not understand that kind of marriage becomes deadly slavery if love doesn’t shape it. … In my view, it’s much better to be a Blue Bird, a Crow, even become an Owl, rather than undergo the death sentence of always having what one hates before one’s eyes. Our times are fertile ground for these kinds of unions.” Zipes translates one line as “Too many matches of this sort I’ve seen.”⁸³ This concern became a more prominent theme, and its lingering representation of destructive power can be seen in three novels published around 1750, Richardson’s Clarissa, Charlotte Lennox’s History of Harriot Stuart, and Haywood’s History of Betsy Thoughtless. These novels often pitted Scriptures against each other, which leaves the heroine in an impossible situation: “Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long” (Exod. 20:12; Clarissa’s certainly were not) versus “Be not unequally yoked” (2 Cor. 6:14). In contrast, Rowe’s Rosalinda runs away from her father’s “Papist” choice of husband and cites “He that loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (2:16, Matt. 10:37). As for Clarissa, the threat is to her immortal soul, but Rowe expresses a strong Protestant sentiment, one shared by most Nonconformists who had welcomed William, and then writes a happy fairy-tale ending. In contrast, Richardson draws the two ideologies as extremes leading to inevitable tragedy. The conflict between individual and community and the demand for sacrifices for family/community were major issues as individualism grew and became increasingly important themes in the novel. Richardson’s Clarissa, for instance, is expected to sacrifice herself for her family’s advancement and dies for her individualism. Richardson’s linking of Clarissa’s stance to religion somewhat aligns his novel with the thinking of Nonconformists like Rowe.

Marriage serves as conclusion to most French women’s fairy tales, but Rowe’s stories are aimed at a different kind of establishment of identity and the closure that comes from it. A striking difference, and Rowe’s third influential innovation, is that d’Aulnoy’s characters are almost invariably reintegrated in their cultures while Rowe’s are not. Several characters never marry, the primary signal of absorption into community in the fiction of the time. Only Silviana is moved back to London and the society from which the other women characters have come. Her story clearly casts doubts on the ideology of male-female complementarity and the staying power even of romantic marriages even as it sketches the more serious threat to Silviana’s integrity and peace of mind. The obverse of Laura’s conversion to the tranquil, carefully guarded life, Silviana pits her love against the threats all around her in high life.

In the fairy tales, material improvement is as important as marriage in the conclusions’ portrayal of the idea of “present illusions of happiness to come.” Although Rowe can sometimes refer to immense, almost unimaginable wealth as she does in Rosalinda’s story, she always adds a vision of an autonomous, satisfying lifestyle. Like the conteuses, she comes to “provide social paradigms that overlap nearly perfectly with daydreams of a better life.”⁸⁴ The tales are actually composed of two inextricably bound narratives, one the story’s plot and the other the unfolding of the mind of (usually) the heroine, who can imagine the “daydreams of a better life.” She is, of course, working toward solving the immediate dilemma in which she finds herself, but also toward a “permanent” solution, the achievement of a lifestyle that expresses an established identity and state of mind. Even in the short tales by Rowe, such as that of the two young women discovered by Bellamour, the state of the women’s minds, their precautions and desires, are given. Thus, the narrative is as Patricia Hannon describes the fairy tales: “marked by the disruption of sequential narrative through self-reflexive amplifications.”⁸⁵ In Rowe’s stories, these two purposes are seamlessly woven together, inseparable because of the drive of the plot.

The goal in these fairy tales is the establishment of a lifestyle, one at least harmonious if not originally created by the heroine. What Jean-Paul Sermain says of the French literary fairy tale in comparison to French novels such as La Princesse de Clèves (1678) is true of Rowe’s: “C’est en analysant les choix littéraires propres au conte classique que nous cherchons à caractériser et à comprendre son imaginaire et une vision du monde originale que les autres genres de fiction ne sauraient exprimer.”⁸⁶ While recognizing that fairy tales are closer to romance and other older forms of fantasy, Hunter notes, “Fairy tales not only contract the scope of romance; they also domesticate its problems and intensify its psychological reach—in some ways very much as the novel would go on to do.” Although he discusses folk fairy tales only and seems to have no knowledge of the French women’s tales, what he says describes the step toward the midcentury novel that Rowe’s tales are. He continues, “Fairy tales address the real world even if they do not altogether grapple with it; they are not among the species of escape literature, in spite of the elements of miracle … and happy ending.”⁸⁷

Rowe addresses most of the problems and situations faced by women in the stories of the women writers of the 1720s, but one marked contrast is that she omits or elides the implications and sometimes prolonged suffering of women entrapped by a tyrannical father or husband or suddenly impoverished and on their own. Her heroines are not maimed as Aubin’s are; women are not married to rapists as Davys’s are, fighting feelings of freakishness as Barker’s are, or experiencing the “resolutions” in Haywood’s fiction, as exemplified by The British Recluse and The Rash Resolve. Hunter notes that, among others, oral narratives were characterized by “alertness to crucial life choices,” “awareness of the individual’s need to cope with cultural expectations,” “willingness to portray major problems and (at least sometimes) allow satisfying solutions, and an interest in events that are strange, surprising, and sometimes inexplicable.” He speculates that the novel, which “picks up where they leave off,” inevitably and necessarily had “to address some of the needs that had been met by the lost tradition.”⁸⁸ Traditions, however, are never lost; we just temporarily lose our ability to follow the thread, as students of the English novel have with the work of the conteuses.

Women and the Fairy-Tale Mode

As this section will show, Margaret Doody did not go far enough when she wrote, “Women poets often write about elves and fairies. Some of them got quite good at it.” Doody went on, “Percy told Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi that in her (unacted) verse drama The Two Fountains she had written better about fairies than anyone since Shakespeare.”⁸⁹ As this reference to a play indicates, women included fairies in all genres. At this point, I want to survey some of the fairy writing that women did after Rowe.

The two fairy tales in Sarah Fielding’s The Governess illustrate both the character and uses of fairy tales and also the ambivalence and growing perception of what the term meant. Both tales are read by Miss Jenny Peace, the exemplary oldest pupil at the little private school. The first is the folkloric story of sweet, little Mignon, who is the captive of an evil giant that is everything an evil giant should be. Through luck and the giant’s carelessness, Mignon is able to escape, paralyze the giant, and liberate the giant’s captives, thereby uniting the lovers Fidus and Amata, who happens to be his sister. Significantly, Mignon is more active and set on rescuing himself and others than the good giant, Benefico. The lesson, then, is an empowering one for the small and weak. In fact, a major moral drawn from the tale by the girls is that “Mignon, in the Moment that he was patiently submitting to his Sufferings, found a Method of relieving himself from them, and of overcoming a barbarous Monster, who had so cruelly abused him” (86). The second, which is twice as long as “Mignon,” is very much like d’Aulnoy’s tales. It is interrupted several times, thereby emphasizing the frame narrative as d’Aulnoy did in The Gentleman-Citizen. “The Princess Hebe” tells the story of the good queen and Hebe driven from the kingdom by the jealous, evil sister-in-law. Rescued by the good fairy, Sybella, they live safely and happily in a cottage in the woods. Sybella has been victimized and exiled by her evil sister, Brunetta. As in so many fairy tales, the father has married badly, and the evil comes about through the scheming, jealous, power-mad wife. Like Aimée in d’Aulnoy’s The Orange Tree and its Beloved Bee, Sybella has a magic wand, which she uses for good and to rescue herself and others. After seven years of peace, in an incident similar to the old man Time tricking Adolphus, an old man tricks Sybella into going on a quest with him. Hebe is immediately tempted by a series of Brunetta’s shepherdesses and is finally tricked into giving aid to a shepherdess who drags her to Brunetta’s castle. Many of the trappings of d’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s stories are included.⁹⁰ Sybella’s setting has “many small green Meadows, with little Rivulets running thro’ them, … the Banks of which, covered with Primroses and Violets.”⁹¹ Brunetta’s castle “glittered,” “sweet Music was heard in every Room,” and the courtiers “omitted nothing that could amuse and delight the Senses” (136). Sybella finally rescues Hebe, and the death of the sister-in-law allows Hebe to assume her rightful throne.

Just as the community of schoolgirls is almost totally lacking in contact with men, this tale is remarkable in that, as Harries says, “it is almost exclusively a story about women.”⁹² This fact allows explorations of topics such as the roots of female rivalry and calls to duty outside conventional gendered life. The feminocentric tale includes the self-reflexive parallel narrative developed by d’Aulnoy and replicated by Rowe, as Hebe comes of age, develops a sense of her limits and powers, and appreciates, first, the joys of her retired life and then the duty she has to accept the crown and do good for others. Two years before The Governess, Fielding published “A Fragment of a Fairy Tale” in Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747). This “fragment” is an important apprentice piece for the fairy tales in The Governess and a very good piece in its own right. A princess is on a journey to the Castle of Wishes with her dwarf and faithful servant Rosetta when she loses her way. She takes refuge with an old woman who, as an infant, at her mother’s request has been given the power by a fairy to receive instantly anything for which she wishes. This power causes her nothing but unhappiness, yet she asks the fairy to renew it when it expires. Granted for one additional year as a trial, she experiences more misery. Her story is a cautionary tale to the princess, and the moral is repeated a few times: “so blind are Mankind to their own real Happiness, that it is oftner to the Gratification than the Disappointment of their Wishes that all their Misery is owing.”⁹³ This story is also exclusively about women, and the old woman is as self-reflexive as d’Aulnoy’s and Rowe’s heroines. The old woman recounts her early childhood, her difficult time at boarding school, and her experiences as a teenager and young woman with her peers of both sexes, and she recounts her own reactions and thoughts at every point.

Boarding school is a horrendous place of jealousies, tattling, and manipulation of the teacher, and, regardless of the character of the groups of young people she joins, she finds callousness and superficiality. Men are definitely passing presences. Her first husband, married as the result of one of her wishes, is indifferent to her and, indeed, without tenderness. He dies within a few pages, and her second husband makes her happy, but we hear almost nothing about him. Her father was “tolerably agreeable, his Understanding not to be complained of, his Humour easy, and his Temper quiet and composed”; he dies a page after his introduction, and her mother “had not that excessive Fondness” for him and “soon got the better of her Grief” (2:228). In fact, the man about whom we learn most is the magician who rears the fairy. Given to him because he was wealthy and her parents had many children, he is a vicious, contradictory tyrant who beats her whenever she shows fear. He often beats her, sees fear, and then beats her again. Finally, he turns her into a rabbit with the pronouncement, “There, you fearful Fool, you may now enjoy your own natural Timidity; for you will immediately be transformed into the most fearful Animal in the Creation” (2:236).

This fairy tale within a fairy tale is short and has the beautiful, graceful heroine, a transition period as an animal, and then an account of the fairy’s interaction with humans. The way the fairy is freed from the curse and restored to her own body is clever. Fielding makes rules for what fairies have the power to do—they cannot change the nature of individual men, for instance. Her fairy, like d’Aulnoy’s, advises and even lectures humans, shakes her head in disappointment, and tries to modify granting wishes to do the least harm. This enjoyable tale is as artful as the story of the princess, which gives the tale the sobriquet of fragment. The princess listens to the old woman’s tale, but just as she is about to answer whether the story has had “the desired Effect,” the old woman’s family returns with their friends (2:275). Thus, two aesthetically crafted stories frame the didactic, dark biography of the old woman. All three are female bildungsroman in the tradition of Rowe. The old woman knows who she is and what she needs for contentment and selfhood, and the princess is at the point of deciding. The contrast between Rowe’s view of human nature and Fielding’s is clear here, however. The reader cannot help but suspect that the princess is, sooner or later, going to take up her doomed journey to the Castle of Wishes.

Fairy tales often center on cardinal sins; d’Aulnoy’s “The King of the Peacocks and the Princess Rosetta” illustrates the evils of envy, pride, and covetousness. The tales are 32 percent of the content of The Governess, and a major theme in the novel is one common to fairy tales: the prevalence and results of rivalry and jealousy between family members. It drives “Hebe,” the stories of some of the schoolgirls, and the story of Celia and Chloe that Miss Dolly reads. Fielding’s texts provide important information about English fairy-tale history. In her preface, Fielding established the validity of using various kinds of imaginative genres to educate by telling a fable designed to open her readers’ minds to all kinds of moral lessons. The text includes other fables, the fairy tales, a letter, a housekeeper’s story, the summary of a play, the story Dolly reads, and the girls-at-school frame, which includes the teacher’s and each girl’s life story. Fairy tales were almost universally imagined as love stories, and the first observation about the story of Mignon is about Fidus and Amata and that they were rewarded for their constancy. As is common with English women’s tales, however, marriage is not consistently the reward and resolution of the woman’s life; Princess Hebe, we are to believe, is happy because she is doing her duty and also helping many people. There is no mention of love, marriage, or children for her.

Fielding is writing in a line of “novels” that have not yet been fully traced; for instance, Jane Barker’s full title is Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; or, Love and Virtue Recommended in a Collection of Instructive Novels. By referring to differing opinions at a “harmonious Tea-Table Entertainment,” she anticipates Eliza Haywood’s Tea Table. Barker’s framing narrative is Galesia’s story, and some critics identify it as “anticipating the bildungsroman”;⁹⁴ Fielding’s story takes Jenny from her narrative of her early life past the date that her aunt comes to take her from the school. Similarly, the story of Hebe is a form of bildungsroman. That Fielding includes a folk and a literary art tale inscribes their parallel paths. Even more indicative of the discussions surrounding fairy tales in 1749 are the sections of the book in which Mrs. Teachum and Jenny discuss the proper use of the tales. Mrs. Teachum insists several times that the fairies are strictly for entertainment and that the children should learn the lessons that they teach, as the giant “is called so only to express a Man of great Power” (84). By the end of the century, writers display even more distrust of fairy tales. Sophia King writes in her 1798 growing-up poem,

Now fairy fancies sunk away,
For gay arose the sun of Truth,
Dispersing with its genial ray
The dear illusive dreams of youth.⁹⁵

Martha Mary Sherwood eliminated both of Fielding’s fairy tales in her revision of The Governess (1820) but substituted a fairy tale about a spoiled, ungovernable princess named Rosalinda. Rosalinda’s mother, who desperately wanted a child, rescues a bird belonging to the fairy Serena. Serena promises her a daughter and checks on the child every year. Finally the king and queen agree to send the unmanageable Rosalinda to fairyland with Serena. Rosalinda’s new governess, Soimeme, is created from her reflection in a mirror. Soimeme is a terrible tyrant, and Rosalinda becomes an exemplary woman and ruler.⁹⁶ The contrast between this fairy tale and the story of Hebe brings to the fore the greater independence of Fielding’s women and the ways conservative Christian ideas of gender drive Sherwood’s book.

Ruth Bottigheimer points out that when the translation of Perrault’s fairy tales “did not sell well as leisure reading … its publishers attempted to recast the book as a French-English schoolbook.” That “foundered.”⁹⁷ The entertainment value of fairy tales, however, resisted all efforts to denigrate or discount them. Some of the most commercially astute and innovative publishers in Britain assured what British fairy-tale historians identify as their fourth wave of popularity. John Harris, successor to John Newbery; Benjamin Tabart, originator of the Popular Stories series; and William Lane, proprietor of the Minerva Press, published many volumes of fairy tales between 1780 and 1830. Lane, it is estimated, published 12,000 copies of fairy tales in twelve years.⁹⁸ The insertion of the fairy tales in novels of the second half of the century shows us their lasting appeal and a variety of technical strategies. Oliver Goldsmith controls the tone of The Vicar of Wakefield with one even as he demonstrates his ability to deploy and manipulate his time’s conventions of mixing genres.⁹⁹ Moses has been sent to sell an aging horse and to buy another. He has been cheated, and the event is described as an “unforeseen disaster” that “demolished” the family’s hopes. The vicar pontificates to his distressed family: “Unequal combinations are always disadvantageous to the weaker side” (chap. 13), which introduces the frame for a fairy tale that Dick, significantly a young child, is asked to tell to amuse the company. A Giant and a Dwarf go on the road to fight and win honor. The Giant wins these things plus a beautiful wife, but the Dwarf loses an arm, an eye, and a leg. The frame narrative resumes with a dispute about whether the daughters will be allowed to go to London with Lady Blarney and Miss Skeggs, who are perceived to be of a much higher class but are ladies of the town. The fairy tale has a sober moral, and yet it is a moment of imaginative entertainment, enjoyable for both its art and its applicability.

What happened to Hebe is labeled “the natural Consequence” first of her disobedience and then of her “Return to duty” (143). Just before Sybella and Hebe are tricked by their desire to help others, the girls have been warned against gullibly giving beggars money: “oftentimes those Fellows made up dismal Stories without much Foundation, and because they were lazy, and would not work.” Whether the beggar was deserving is left undetermined. Dolly notes that he looks “almost starved,” but his story of being “burnt out of his House, and from one Distress to another, reduced to that miserable State” can seem hyperbolically exaggerated (109). Fielding seems to be anticipating a common criticism of fairy tales—one of the girls, notably the youngest, asks if they would not be better off hearing a “true history,” the common name for novels. That the two most admirable, knowledgeable characters explain the usefulness of fairy tales and all of the girls learn important lessons from them counters all possible criticism. Notably, later in the text the discussion of how to read plays and their value is much longer.

Interestingly, during Fielding’s career, as a genre fairy tales were approaching what we think of them and identify with Perrault and the Grimm brothers. However, when people said (and say) “it’s a fairy tale,” they often mean what Rowe wrote —love stories with unlikely, happy endings. The story of Celia and Chloe is really a Rowe-style fairy tale, and Fielding’s History of Ophelia (1760) includes “forms that Fielding experimented with throughout her career” and what one of her editors has called “the airy fairy-tale plot.” Harries speculates that Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont imitated The Governess by surrounding her fairy tales with moral dialogues between a governess and the six young women in her care. Beaumont somewhat disingenuously repudiated the earlier fairy tales for inspiring “false ideas” and, as was common as the century progressed, highlighted the educational and “civilizing” usefulness of her fairy tales.¹⁰⁰

Catherine Talbot, one of the Bluestockings who visited the Countess of Hertford to absorb the ambiance of the grounds and read Rowe’s letters and poems in the green leather-bound letter book, wrote a fairy tale shortly after one of her visits in 1753.¹⁰¹ During that visit, Hertford (then Duchess of Somerset) had her grandson and his cousin with her, and Talbot wrote the fairy tale for them. She names the central character George for the boy she and the duchess wanted to encourage, but the good fairy disguised as an old crone is named “Instruction,” and statues with names like “Flattery” and “Modesty” come to life in her castle and lecture the boys. Other names are also in the old morality play tradition. The progress literature of writers like Bunyan meets the developing bildungsroman in her tale. Parts of it are highly imaginative—Good Temper is made of sugar and is as firm and “almost as clear as Chrystal,” and George is given a tiny cabinet with millions of little drawers for his collected treasures. George reaches the Top of the Mountain and the glittering Temple of Felicity, perhaps a name allusive with d’Aulnoy’s first fairy tale. The tale is heavily didactic, and Talbot chose not to publish it, but it shows the blending together of fairy tale and English moral literary conventions.¹⁰² Once published, it was frequently included in collections under a number of different titles. For example, John Gregory includes it in his Father’s Legacy to his Daughters as “Education: A Fairy Tale,” and as “The Story of Little George” it was included with many of d’Aulnoy’s in Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales.¹⁰³

Something of a unified tradition developed that is bound together by women’s extraction of an aesthetic, an essence (like perfume), themes, and a shared aspiration for women’s quality of life. Fairies of the trooping variety were invoked throughout the eighteenth century in women’s writing to create special kinds of settings, and poetry and prose moved apart.¹⁰⁴ In poetry, the references are like those little moments in Rowe’s texts that recall an atmosphere. Anne Finch teases her husband to leave his studies and come enjoy the day “when faery Cercles better mark the ground” than compasses used to chart battles in An Invitation to Dafnis (1689).¹⁰⁵ Poetry more often than prose brings to mind the creations of Spenser, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton and other dramatic and poetic fairies. Robert Herrick begins Hesperides (1648), “I write of Groves, and Twilights and I sing / The Court of Mab and of the Fairie-King.”¹⁰⁶ In Ode to Indifference (1757), Frances Greville asks Oberon, king of the fairies, to make the nymph Indifference her guest, thereby allowing her to live a tranquil, content life. This poem was printed as often in the century as Thomas Gray’s much better known Elegy in a Country Church-Yard.¹⁰⁷ Modern critics puzzle over its appeal, but part of it was certainly that the entire poem is a delightful, imaginative address to Oberon, whom she calls “Wanton Sprite” and “Fairy Elf.” Like d’Aulnoy’s Zephyr in Isle of Happiness, her Oberon is like the playful, dancing breeze. In exchange for indifference, she wishes, “So may the Glow worms glim’ring light / Thy tiny footsteps lead / To some new Region of Delight” (lines 53–55). The originality and much-admired tone spring from this fantasy and the comparison between her imagining of Oberon’s temperament and the poet’s representation of her speaker’s brooding over disappointments. A poem that could be maudlin or lugubrious becomes playful, always interrupting descents into “the tears which pity taught to flow” with references to, for instance, Oberon’s “Acorn Goblet.” Intriguingly, Margaret Doody points out that fairies “do not have to be moral—a great convenience, and an enviable one to women.”¹⁰⁸

Greville’s poem attracted numerous poetic responses for the rest of the century,¹⁰⁹ and the appeal of the fairy device is clear. For example, Isabella Byron Howard’s The Fairy’s Answer purports to relay an answer from Oberon. Howard, the Countess of Carlisle, mentions that she hopes to give the poem in person to Greville. Eliza Tuite also answered the poem, and she is the author of five poems in the voice of a sylph.¹¹⁰ William Cowper wrote one of the poems that objected to her desire:

Join me, amid your silent hours,

To form the better pray’r.

With lenient balm, may Ob’ron hence

To fairy-land be driv’n;

With ev’ry herb that blunts the sense
Mankind receiv’d from heaven.¹¹¹

Perhaps with Greville’s poem in mind, Laetitia Barbauld wrote in Verses written in an Alcove (1773),

This is sure the haunt of fairies,

In yon cool Alcove they play;

Care can never cross the threshold,

Care was only made for day.

These lines follow the creation of a magic, natural bower where streams of soft moonlight filter through the branches. Verse after verse contrasts this fairy world to the everyday one—“soft affections” rather than passions, “Easy, blithe” rather than grief, anxiety, and ambition. Anne Bannerman in her great war poem, Verses on an Illumination for a Naval Victory, breaks the catalogue of horrors:

O! for a lodge, where Peace might love to dwell,
In some sequester’d, solitary dell!
Some fairy isle, beyond the Southern wave,
Where War ne’er led his victims to the grave. (lines 75–79)

In poetry and fiction references to fairies give writers unusual freedom of imagination.¹¹² The style becomes lighter, and there are often marked contrasts between things with which the writer is struggling and the verses describing escapes from them. These struggles are exceptionally varied, as they range from states of mind to difficult experiences to vexed expression. As in Barbauld’s poem, Ann Murry briefly turns from the Muses to the fairies for poetic inspiration:

Or grown perhaps quite gay and airy,
Address bright Oberon the Fairy,
To take me in his pygmy train,
.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .
With dulcet tones enrich my song. (B&I, 766–67)

These escapes are often short-lived, thereby emphasizing the contrast. In Murry’s poem, for instance, the Muse interrupts this flight: “All vain pretenders I deride” (767, line 26), and Joanna Baillie uses a reference to them to argue the universality of inspiration (Address to the Muses, lines 121–26).

Women continue to find fairy tales and the fairy-tale mode useful literary strategies, as Sharon Rose Wilson’s Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction from Atwood to Morrison with its contemporary, global coverage, demonstrates. Either stand-alone or embedded, they serve many functions for women. In the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on the benefits of reading, the moral aspects of fairy tales were often advertised (no matter how little they figured in the plots). John Newbery, for instance, advertised editions of d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales as “published for the amusement of all those Little Masters and Misses who … aim at becoming Great Lords and Ladies” (1776, 1785, and many other reprints). Although this language invoked fantasy and the virtues of chivalry, it also suggested both upward mobility and the gentility movement. A 1733 advertisement for Rowe’s collected book read, “no Book can be fitter for the Perusal of young People at our Boarding-Schools … to form their Minds aright,”¹¹³ and Clara Reeve wrote that Rowe’s works were “proper for youth” in The Progress of Romance (1785). In time, some of Rowe’s letters were included in textbooks, including the “highly esteemed” grammar-school reader A Collection of Prose and Verse by Arthur Masson.¹¹⁴

As in Rowe’s and the eighteenth-century women’s texts, the writers whom Wilson studies continue the tradition of using embedded tales to portray transformations from alienation and imprisonment to “greater consciousness, community, and wholeness.”¹¹⁵ As Wilson shows, the grappling with women’s needs to maneuver a terrain of sexual politics remains a consistent theme in the tales. Interestingly, critics like Wilson work with the motifs of Perrault in spite of the fact that modern women’s fairy tales are more like d’Aulnoy’s in style, content, and purpose. As Jack Zipes asserts, the salon women’s “remarkable fairy tales set the tone and standards for the development of most of the memorable literary fairy tales in the West up to the present.”¹¹⁶ Their themes, exposés, and aesthetics reappear over and over, as they do in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have identified their strands in, for example, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Villette.¹¹⁷ As A. S. Byatt in “Fairy Stories” observes,

The literary fairy tale is a wonderful, versatile hybrid form, which draws on primitive apprehensions and narrative motifs, and then uses them to think consciously about human beings and the world. Both German romantic fairy tales and the self-conscious playful courtly stories of seventeenth-century French ladies, combine the new thought of the time with the ancient tug of forest and castle, demon and witch, vanishing and shape-shifting, loss and restoration.¹¹⁸

Donald Haase argues that the conteuses “provided a model for twentieth-century women writers who (re)wrote fairy tales in order to interrogate gender.”¹¹⁹ Certainly as their tales have become better known, adaptations of them have become more literary and intriguing. Examples are “The Great Green Worm” by A. S. Byatt, The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter, and Anne Sexton’s transformed fairy tales. Byatt’s version of d’Aulnoy’s Green Worm (Serpentin vert) includes descriptions of Hidessa’s solitary contentment in beautiful outdoor settings and her enjoyment of “serious books, books of courtly love, history books” and hearing news of the world. Byatt brings out many of d’Aulnoy’s signature touches, such as references to high-culture authors, performances, and texts, including Psyche, and vivid physical descriptions of characters, human and in other forms.¹²⁰ Carter’s story draws upon and compliments d’Aulnoy’s The Story of the White Cat and other stories, sometimes explicitly as when Beauty finds “a collection of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds.”¹²¹ Consistent throughout history are transformations of individuals and their surroundings, and in fairy tales by women, as Sharon Wilson says, is the “search for identity, individuation, and healing.”¹²² Rowe’s stories carry out these transformations in an understated way, and restless, seeking women find peace and often a strikingly individual lifestyle, as Melinda does.

The final story of Laura is more of a unifying technical move than has been recognized. Laura changes more than any of Rowe’s other characters, and by the end she is at peace with herself and her surroundings. She says the rural setting naturally leads her to thoughts of religion—and her lack of it. With a play on fairy-tale metamorphoses, she imagines herself at death transformed not into an angel but a magpie, a reptile, or a cow. From the frenetic first letter (“I hate trees”), she moves through “some religious panicks” and then to the calm of true religion. “With the evidence I now have of a future existence, my notions of happiness are refined and enlarged, my hopes bright and unlimited” (Letters, 3:224, 247, 251, respectively). While in the country, she has met Philocles and fallen in love with him. He tells her of his premonition of his own impending death: “I listened to this story as to a fairy tale, or a sort of waking dream” (3:246). She laughs, but he does die. Significantly, it is labeled a fairy tale, and the connotations of “visionary” and linkage to prophetic are activated. Earlier Laura has noted that the country is giving her the vapours: “Death that ghastly phantom, perpetually intrudes on my solitude.” She then invokes fairy-tale thinking that she says she has grown beyond: “Nor have I acquired any great degree of fortitude by turning free-thinker and unlearning ‘All that the nurse and all the priest have taught.’ Mr. Pope.” This reference from The Rape of the Lock (Canto 1, line 30), notable for its sylphs, to fairy tales and superstition is followed by the metamorphosis fantasy, which she says her brother calls “a visionary here after” (3:226).

Like characters in Friendship in Death, Philocles comes back to speak with her. She says that his voice “charmed the wildest discord into calm attention; every accent breathed celestial love and harmony” (Letters, 3:250). His care for her and his description and assurances about the next world are like those in the first volume, but the effect on her and the rounding out of the conversion story, the only one among the tales, are new. Rowe has also developed more meaningful aesthetic touches. Philocles leans on a sundial on a marble pedestal, symbol not only of his limited time with her but of the brief human life span. Other references recall earlier letters and develop thematic, intertextual connections. Both Melinda and Laura refer to Addison’s Cato. Philocles has been reading Young’s A Vindication of Providence: or a True Estimate of Human Life, In which the Passions are considered in a New Light (1728), and so the author to whom she referred in her dedication is recalled in the last sequence of letters.

Specialists today recognize that the popularity and development of fairy tales are smoothly continuous rather than sporadic. It is one of the genres that has been most frequently and successfully adapted to new social uses and to changing consumer demands.¹²³ Karen Rowe in a much-quoted essay points out that many genres today, including popular romances, magazine fiction, and film, depend on fairy-tale prototypes.¹²⁴ Elizabeth Singer Rowe was a key transitional adapter, one of the writers that transformed it into novelistic discourse and made them conform to British demands for both realism and magic stories. While others’ fiction was being ridiculed for the use of coincidence, Rowe took a more daring course by unapologetically providing modern fairy tales—stories of trial and discovery with somewhat impossibly attractive characters and uncommon happy endings.