Frances Brookeis "Circle of Friends": The Limits of Epistolarity in The History of Emily Montague

The recent republication of The Female American, first published anonymously in 1767, has made available to us an important eighteenth-century transatlantic novel, one that raises a number of formal, feminist, and (post)colonial concerns central to our critical moment.¹ Most significantly, perhaps, the availability of this edition gives early Americanists the chance, once again, to begin to relinquish the old critical chestnut that the history of the American novel "begins" in 1789 with the publication of William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, or—as is more true of undergraduate and graduate courses in the American novel—with Susannah Rowson's 1792 republication in the United States of Charlotte Temple or with Charles Brockden Brown's publication in 1798 of the more avowedly "American" Wieland; or, The Transformation. The logic that the creation of the republic in 1789 coincides with the invention of the American novel has had and still has a deep hold upon our imagination, a hold that we will be loathe to give up until we reconstruct more definitively the history of the eighteenth-century transatlantic novel.²

In any such reconstruction, Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769) will no doubt be one of the novels recovered and reassessed. It has, in fact, enjoyed a modest critical success in the last 20 years, with more than a dozen articles on it appearing in a variety of scholarly journals. It has been reprinted in paperback³ and in a definitive scholarly edition.⁴ Brooke herself has been the subject of a scholarly biography.⁵ But the audience for this recovery seems primarily to have been scholars of Canadian literature: the novel has yet to reach other audiences whose critical interests would seem to dovetail with Brooke's subject matter and themes.⁶ As Robin Howells noted in 1993, the "[novel] is entirely neglected in Britain, the place of its original publication" (438). Lorraine McMullen observed more than 20 years ago that scholars of Canadian literature had recovered and revalued Emily Montague while ignoring Brooke's other novels; and that, ironically, the British literary tradition had recovered Brooke's first novel, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), while ignoring Emily Montague (Odd Attempt, 31–32). The "tradition" in American literary studies has been to ignore Brooke and Emily Montague entirely. Yet Brooke's novel takes up questions that are central to the discourse of sensibility in the 1760s and 1770s and her treatment of those questions engages in important ways the emergent discourse of nationhood and national identity in the last third of the eighteenth century. Within the broader transatlantic context of novels like Emily Montague and The Female American, then, the American novels of the 1790s can be seen more clearly as one strand of the emergent western discourse of/on nationalism, not simply as an expression of some fundamental "Americanness."

The History of Emily Montague is an epistolary novel that recounts the courtship and marriage of three different sets of lovers in Canada and England from April 1766 to November 1768. Col. Ed Rivers is a British officer who, because of a reduced family income, immigrates to Canada to settle land that the Crown has given him for military service. Upon his arrival, he soon meets Emily Montague, whose "beauty, delicacy, [and] sensibility" (24) immediately captivate him, despite her engagement to Sir George Clayton. Eventually, that engagement is broken off, all other difficulties are overcome, and Rivers and Montague marry and settle in England. Rivers writes about one-third of the novel's 228 letters.⁷ Another third of the letters are written by Arabella Fermor, an immigrant to Canada with her father; she is an acquaintance of all the major characters and, like Emily, a marriageable young woman. Arabella is more practical, more independent, and less sentimental than Emily and Rivers; she gradually falls in love with another English officer, Fitzgerald, and they, too, marry and return to England. The two couples take up residence close enough to each other to form a small, self-enclosed...