Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie (review)

HUMANITIES 245 provided literary scholars with another useful and teachable novel which is intelligently presented and edited. (ELEANOR TY) Amelia Opie. Adeline Mowbray. Edited with an introduction and notes by Shelley King and John B. Pierce Oxford University Press 1999. xxxx, 290. US $12.95 This volume is a welcome addition to the increasing number of texts from the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle currently available to readers, students, and scholars. It provides a critique of Godwinian philosophical and social values, whose insufficiency in the light of the real world has tragic consequences for the heroine. The central characters, Adeline and Glenmurray , are, according to the editors, meant to represent Wollstonecraft and Godwin, although in this case it is the male who dies first, leaving the protagonist a social outcast. The central issue in the novel is Adeline's conversion to, and insistence on maintaining, Glenmurray's philosophy that social bonds, including marriage, are unnatural and restricting, and that an agreement between two adults is superior to the contracts inherent in civil and religiOUS marriage ceremonies. She elopes with him and refuses every offer he makes to legitimize the relationship, on the grounds that to do so would undermine his own integrity. He, meanwhile, knowing that he is dying, that Adeline is pregnant, and that his considerable fortune can only pass to his legitimate heirs, does everything he can to persuade her otherwise. Several illuminating incidents, including her treatment at the hands of respectable society and her observation of the treatinent of an illegitimate child in a playground, sway her only temporarily. It may well have been this naive foolhardiness that made Dorothy Wordsworth 'quite sick: and unable to finish the book. The World's Classics series format serves Opie's novel well. The cover boasts the usual fine art print, but in this case, rather than choosing a painting with a vague thematic tie to the novel, the deSigners have had the good sense to select a portrait of the author by her husband, John Opie. The work is lightly but adequately annotated and the introduction is ample, if somewhat pedestrian and repetitious. The note on the 'season at Bath' would be more helpful had it indicated what time of year the season took place; and some explanation of why Richmond is so classical and beautiful would be welcome. The note on the stench of the sickroom could be amplified by indicating that smallpox has a distinctive smell, not confined to the sickrooms of the poor. Smallpox epid emics were strikingly democratic. The reference to Walter Shandy's forgetting his grief in words surely invokes Bobby's funeral oration and not the Tr;strapaedia. The latter is, however, an appropriate reference point, because the entire section on 246 LEITERS IN CANADA 2000 Adeline's upbringing by her scholarly mother seems an extended reference to Tristram Shandy: Editha ponders the theories of shoes, like Walter puzzling over the latus clavus; her book, like his, fails to advance as quickly as the child; and Locke is her reigning influence. The novel has shifts of tone. Its earlier pages have a satirical bite that resembles Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers; subsequently , its death scenes, faintings, temporary madness, and parental curses are much more like the sentimental novels of the period. Opie has been compared to Jane Austen, but Austen skewered fainting and running mad in her juvenilia. Despite these shortcomings, and perhaps because of them, I recommend this novel. Its contradictions illustrate the conflicting opinions even Godwin's friends had about his theories. (MARTHA F. BOWDEN) SeeOlldan} Sources ill the History ofCaltadilill Medicine: A Bibliography - Volunle 2. Compiled by Charles G. Roland and Jacques Bernier Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xxxiv, 246. $74.95 Bibliographies, collection guides, repository directories, and historiographical essays are important reference tools in identifying and assessing source materials. Such reference tools are few in the field of Canadian medical history. Thus the long-awaited publication of Secondary Sotlrces in the Histon) ofCanadian Medicine: A Bibliography - Volume Two, compiled by medical historians Charles G. Roland, MD and Jacques Bernier, PhD, constitutes a significant contribution and welcomed resource for scholars, students, and others working in this field. Volume 2 of Secolldary...