Belmour: A Modern Edition

Introduction

✦ xvii ✦ Introduction “I am going to pass an hour with Lord Belmour,” Mary Berry wrote to Anne Damer. “I dare say we shall both of us think of you.”1 This quotation captures perfectly the autobiographical themes of Damer’s only novel, Belmour. In this work, she explored romantic passion, the erotic distance between lover and beloved, and the pernicious influence of selfish mentors. Influenced by Ann Radcliffe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, perhaps, Elizabeth Inchbald, Anne Damer began Belmour in Portugal. By writing a novel, she could evoke the comforting presence of Mary Berry, confronting her feelings for the young woman in the voice of a male suitor named Belmour. While sometimes read as a window into her private life, however , Belmour conceals as much as it reveals. Twenty years before she published her novel, Anne Damer became the target of personal abuse. Newspaper caricatures blamed her for her separation from her husband, his suicide, and her apparent lack of grief. Hester Thrale linked her to sapphism generally and to the actress Elizabeth Farren in particular ,2 while others fanned the flames. William Combe in The First of April, attacked Damer out of pique against the Hertford family, to which Damer was related on her father’s side (Hertford was Damer’s father’s older brother). Jack Cavendish in A Sapphick Epistle and observers of her close friendship with the Duchess of Devonshire seemed threatened by and unduly curious about Damer’s sexual and financial independence. These rumors circulated from the 1770s until the time she published Belmour. Damer countered them through her acting, her sculpture, and, perhaps, her novel, but they never disappeared . Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask explores Anne Damer’s erotic relationship with Elizabeth Farren, while Andrew Elfen- ✦ xviii ✦ bein’s Romantic Genius explains how rumors about her lesbian identity influenced her artistic career. “As a potential response to rumors of sapphism,” Elfenbein notes, “Belmour extends the strategy of Damer’s sculpture. It denies the marginality that such rumors imposed on her by showing her ability to participate in major literary trends of the day, such as the psychological novel.”3 Five years after inheriting Strawberry Hill, Damer published Belmour along the lines first sketched by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Clara Reeves’s The Old English Baron, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Though set mostly in England, Belmour is more cosmopolitan (though no less antiCatholic ) than gothic novels set in Italy. Damer’s extensive travels lend authority to the Portuguese and Italian settings of Belmour, however much influenced by Radcliffe, who never visited the countries she so beautifully described. Perhaps Damer ’s work as a neoclassical sculptress (her reading of Epictetus and her assiduous notes taken at numerous museums) led her to look outside of England for literary models. Politically, she was cosmopolitan or Whiggish enough to present Napoleon with a bust of Charles James Fox and to send her bust of Lord Nelson to the king of Tanjore. Most important for Belmour was Damer’s use of the uncanny and her exploration of the theme of melancholy, which drew on her passionate friendship with Mary Berry first articulated in her Lisbon notebooks. There is no doubt that Damer’s life influenced her art. To compartmentalize them is to see how closely they intertwine. The Work: Belmour Damer’s novel appeared in July 1801 and met with a brief but positive notice in the Monthly Review: “Considerable talents are here displayed in the support and delineation of characters, ✦ xix ✦ accompanied by many just reflections, and a knowledge of the world.” Though generally appreciative of Belmour’s “just reflections ,” the reviewer questioned the work’s morality: “We must except, however, the libertine behaviour of Lord Belmour, in violating the rights of honor and hospitality by his criminal intimacy with Lady Roseberg; a conduct which cannot easily be reconciled with the openness and generosity of his disposition. That man can have little soundness of principle or true benevolence , who is guilty of such a flagrant act of villainy in the house of his unsuspecting friend.—Nor can we commend his virtuous wife, as Emily Courtenay is described to be, her expressions of tenderness towards her former admirer, and still giving him hopes of their future union.—We cannot deem that author’s moral sentiments quite correct, who holds up such characters as worthy of our perfect approbation and esteem.”4 Despite...