Kelroy by Rebecca Rush (review)

“Kelroy is like Austen—with evil,” a reviewer once said of Rebecca Rush’s 1812 novel, and never was there a more appropriate summary of this book (9). In Kelroy’s first half (warning: spoilers), the conniving Mrs. Hammond, who has been widowed and left in poverty thanks to her husband’s debts, schemes to arrange her two daughters’ marriages. To do so, she must keep up appearances, never fully divulging the state of her financial affairs, retreating to the countryside in the name of grief so that she can obtain the money she needs to affix her children to wealthy husbands and restore her family’s status among Philadelphia’s finest socialites. While she successfully finds a suitor for her eldest, Lucy, her youngest, Emily, proves recalcitrant. Emily falls for Kelroy, a financially unstable poet, and refuses to marry anyone but him. Part 1 concludes with Kelroy’s proposal to Emily and his departure for India on a business trip, just as Mrs. Hammond—with creditors beating down her door—wins the lottery in a stroke of unbelievably good fortune. In Kelroy’s second half, that fortune dwindles and winks out. The Hammonds’ house burns down and the family loses almost everything. Meanwhile, Emily receives a letter from Kelroy, still abroad, saying that he no longer loves her; destroyed, she agrees to marry Mr. Dunlevy, whose significant wealth inspires Mrs. Hammond to encourage the union. The matriarch does not live to see the nuptials, however; instead, Mrs. Hammond suffers a stroke and dies at the wedding. When Emily later rummages through her mother’s effects, the grieving newlywed finds draft copies of Kelroy’s letters and discovers that her mother forged them all with the help of Emily’s scorned lover, Mr. Marney, whom she set aside in favor of Kelroy. Emily drops dead from the news, Mr. Marney shoots himself in the eye and hand, and Kelroy learns—too late—of Mrs. Hammond’s treachery.

The Early American Imprints version of Kelroy, edited by Richard Pressman and published in 2014, did important work by making this understudied text available for the first time since 1992 and aggregating what scant information we have about its author, Rebecca Rush. It also provided the public with the novel’s book history and explained why it may have failed to attract attention. Written just before print technologies facilitated American-authored book sales and just after arranged marriages had begun to fall out of favor, Kelroy was both too soon and too late.

This Broadview edition, edited by Betsy Klimasmith and published in 2016, extends these contributions and contexts. As with the previous iterations of Kelroy, the narrative is accessible, the footnotes are uncluttered, and the images are limited (Pressman’s lacked images), which makes the book cost-effective. Klimasmith’s version, however, adds something new by discussing how the text’s emphasis on marriage and seduction is also informed by its concern with city life, sociability, and transatlanticism. Her introduction is particularly useful for explaining Kelroy’s cultural context, both as a narrative in conversation with other seduction novels, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, and as a groundbreaking text that showcases the “powerful but understated forces that move the cosmopolitan Philadelphia society [Rush] chronicles, from the unwritten rules of polite conversation to the deathly reverberations of swallowed pride” (9). Although I disagree with the editor’s assertion that Kelroy “departs significantly from [the seduction] pattern” (14), and more could be done to explain the significance of replacing the traditional male libertine with the coquette’s mother, I appreciate Klimasmith’s contextualization of the novel within Atlantic Rim culture and the way she explains Philadelphia’s significance as a protocity at the time of the novel’s publication. This text would work synchronistically with Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism, as well as with Rowson’s and...