Eliza Fenwick: Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock

Eliza Fenwick was a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, so no wonder that her novel Secresy (sic, 1795) has a feminist – well: I was going to say ’subtext’ or ‘undertone’, but that isn’t quite adequate, as the feminism here is overt. This is an epistolary novel, the letters exchanged for the most part between two young women, Caroline Ashburn – sensible daughter of a foolish rich mother – and the extravagantly named Sibella Valmont, who, like a proper Gothic heroine, lives in enforced isolation in her strange uncle’s moated castle. (The title’s ‘ruin on the rock’ is a mediaeval hermitage on the grounds of the castle, pivotal to the plot in many ways – but I suppose it can be read as a pun, too.)

This uncle, Mr Valmont, has some idiosyncratic notions about education, especially the education of women: his ’system’ is never properly explained, but it seems to consist of keeping the girl’s feeble brain as untouched by any information or external influence as possible, as well as making her submit to capricious and unreasonable treatment so that she’ll become a ‘tractable and obedient companion of a husband’. In Sibella’s case, he didn’t get quite the results he was after. The girl is romantic, idealistic, stubborn and hopelessly eccentric – her dearest companion is a domesticated fawn named Nina (presumably named after the heroine of Paisiello’s eponymous opera of 1790) – but far more intelligent and sophisticated in her reasoning than the other characters, barring Caroline, who is really the sole of voice of reason. These young women’s friendship is very romantic – ‘I love you, Sibella, with all my soul,’ declares Caroline – but each has her troubled romantic entanglement with the male species. Sibella is in love with her childhood companion, the first young man she has ever met. Caroline is far more difficult to please, but she is far from cold and unromantic.

The cover blurb says Fenwick ‘warns against excessive sentiment and the romantic daydreams women were encouraged to amuse themselves with’, but I don’t think this is quite the case; I’d say Fenwick explores rather than ‘warns’. At any rate, if her purpose is to teach something, the lesson is a baffling one. Caroline describes the ideal formula for upright conduct:

Be openly firm in the resolution to do right, and, my life for it, the opposition of mistake and prejudice will bear no proportion to your perseverance.

And even:

Your every intention should have been as public to those by whom you were surrounded as to yourself.

But even with the best of intentions, the characters find themselves either unable or unwilling to reconcile sincerity with prudence. Sibella’s emotional honesty lands her in trouble with people who don’t share her ideals, and Caroline, who manages well enough when only her own good conduct is called for, finds that the forces of ‘mistake and prejudice’ are everywhere and implicate everyone. The word ’secresy’ pops up with increasing frequency in different contexts: characters keep secrets from their parents, guardians, children, employers, friends – from good motives, bad motives, and no particular motives at all.

When looking for possible precursors to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, people are quick to point out ‘The Letters of Julia and Caroline’, a rather dreary (pace Maria Edgeworth: I do love her) epistolary short story of an impulsive woman’s ruin from Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies. But why does nobody ever mention Secresy? The ’sense vs. sensibility’ and ‘nature vs. art’ debate was raging in the 1790s, when Austen apparently wrote the first version of her novel, so the shared themes are no big surprise, but I couldn’t help but hear many Austen echoes in Fenwick’s writing. You could almost imagine Sense and Sensibility being written as a response to, and (at least moral-wise) improvement on, Secresy. Elinor Dashwood always knows the right course of action and insists on following it, whatever the cost, and the other Austen heroines at least know such a course exists, if they can find it; Fenwick’s characters, on the other hand, can never really be sure. (Interestingly enough, the true Marianne figure in Secresy is a man - ’wild, variable, and inconsistent’ to the point of hysteria, a romantic idealist who agitates himself into a life-threatening illness. I won’t say more for fear of spoilers.)

From the part Gothic, part didactic set-up you’d expect Secresy to be either sentimental or moralising, but instead Fenwick employs a sort of cynical emotional realism. Characters resist reformation, act stupidly or selfishly (or both at once), are unpredictable, unreliable and inconsistent, and disappoint narrative expectations; only Caroline keeps relatively level-headed, and only one other character learns something in the course of the novel. I won’t say who and what, because I think Secresy deserves to be more widely read, and for me at least the reading experience was enhanced by my knowing absolutely nothing about the plot beforehand. Several surprise elements make this a real page-turner, and if you can guess the entire outcome, you’re a thousand times more perceptive a reader than I am.

Final Verdict: I Adore These Books; Or, Whatever Happened to Pandora Press? In the Eighties, this imprint released a series titled ‘Mothers of the Novel’ - a number of forgotten novels by female authors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of which have never been reprinted by any other publisher since. I’ve been consistently delighted by each MOTN selection I’ve read thus far, and I’m planning to the entire series second-hand. Secresy is one of the best kept secrets in the world of obscure eighteenth-century novels: it kept me reading till the wee hours, anxious, involved, and desperately hoping for the best. If you think from my description that you might like this novel, you’ll probably love it. If you’re a Jane Austenite, you must read it – if only to let me know what you think about the Sense and Sensibility connection!

Pandora Press, 1989, 299 pp., paperback; ISBN: 0863583075  (out of print)

(Available in a Broadview Press edition, also paperback, ISBN: 1551112167)