Friendship in Fashion, Manuscripts, Scriptures, and Death

A man is murdered by a friar in Rome, at the entrance to a monastery. From the dead he writes to his still-living friend, urging him to rescue the young woman whom he had converted to Protestantism. This fictional letter would have chilled readers with a pre-Gothic frisson, even more because its famous—and very real—author had now passed into what Paula Backscheider describes as her own “exemplary” death (166). The book was 1739’s Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, offered posthumously to great acclaim. Elizabeth Singer was previously best known for 1728’s Friendship in Death in Twenty Letters From the Dead to the Living, a metaphysical phenomenon that made her name in England and the American colonies. Given her major impact on Anglophone readers, there should be many scholarly volumes now dedicated to her. In fact, however, there is so little in print that even many area specialists do not know her name.

Part of Singer’s lamentable obscurity can be attributed to scholars categorizing her as a pious tastemaker whose public life modeled conduct-book virtue, rather than as the innovative creative writer she actually was. Her fiction featured polite conversation, aesthetic marriages presented more for lifestyle notes than dramatic tension, and a moderate tone rendering her insufficiently polemical to be as memorable as a Behn, Haywood, or Manley. However, Backscheider’s study complicates easy dismissal, noting accurately that readers may have “sacralized” Singer, but that beneath a normative surface her work was “highly, even wildly experimental in both content and form” (128); “transgressive” (for example, in her message that marriage was not the only way to be happy) (147); “subversive” (in her themes of independence, and edgy resistance to strict heteronormativity (41); and occasionally borderline erotic. It only made sense that Singer invoked God, scripture, and the afterlife, for as Backscheider shows, the most abundant form of printed letter in the eighteenth century was religious in nature, building a literary theological consensus “remarkably isolated from the doctrinal controversies raging in London, Oxford, and among country parsons” (179). This popular divinity reinforced individual faith, creating a sense of community among readers who acquired social polish, learned techniques of self-mastery, and cultivated peace of mind conveyed via psychologized concepts of sensibility and politeness. Even some of Singer’s most sensational tales, such as the one in which a woman reveals that her oldest son is not her husband’s, somehow through her pen seem unsensational, allowing her to “move … fiction toward novelistic discourse by taming plots” (152). This rendered them more palatable to her contemporaries, but also repulsed many later literary scholars who wrote Singer off as stylized and irrelevant.

Backscheider contextualizes Singer as “an important, transitional figure between the writers of amatory fiction and the authors of the genteel novels of manners” (82), weaving her among such predecessors and compatriots as Aphra Behn, Marie D’Aulnoy, Eliza Haywood, French salonièrres, Alexander Pope, and James Thompson. She then tracks Singer’s demonstrable influence on such successors as Sarah Fielding, Mary Collyer, Frances Burney, and, most significantly, the Bluestockings and Samuel Richardson. Describing Singer’s work as “pivotal” (124), Backscheider shows her combining such early genres available to women as patchworks, fairy tales, apparition literature, and epistolaries, discussing these less-studied genres for their own sake rather than as protonovels.

This book bridges a gap between the fiction of the 1720s and Richardson’s era, making a strong case that Singer’s epistolaries prefigure Pamela and Clarissa, and noting that Richardson the printer published editions of her books...