are the model for good government. After condemning the irresponsible practices of both Irish and British aristocrats (she likens the tyranny of absentee British landlords in Ireland to that of slaveholders in Jamaica), she supports a «union» between England and Ireland that is dramatized in her novel by the marriage of the Anglo-Irish Lord Coulambre, a young man in whom 'English prudence governed but did not extinguish, his Irish enthusiasm,' to the Irish Grace Nugent, a young woman of intelligence, passionate loyalty, and 'civil courage.' Many critics have read Edgeworth as advocating a benevolent paternalism, as being «complicit» in a bourgeois patriarchy. It is true that Edgeworth, like many Romantic women novelists, endorsed Edmund Burke's concept of the family as the paradigm for a successful system of government-but she insisted on the equal rights of the mother and the father to guide and control those children who need to be governed. She finally advocated a family-politic in which a liberal and universal educational reform instituted by enlightened rulers (like her father and herself at Edgeworthstown) would gradually improve the social order without the political turmoil or financial and personal costs -333- of a military revolution. Gender equality and racial harmony could be achieved, she believed, by converting the aristocracy, the laboring classes, and even slaves (as in her story 'The Grateful Negro') to the values and practices of the professional (and now maternalistic as well as paternalistic) middle classes.
Like Belinda, Susan Ferrier's
These twin daughters, Adelaide and Mary, function in the novel as exemplars of faulty and successful female education, respectively. Adelaide, living with her mother in London, learns by example to be 'heartless and ambitious'; even more cold and selfishly calculating than her mother, she marries the elderly, obstinate Duke of Altamont for his money. She then finds his dogged refusal to satisfy her every whim intolerable and runs off with her cousin Lindore, only to see his sexual ardor rapidly cool into «indifference» and herself condemned to a life of «wretchedness» as a 'friendless… outcast' in a foreign land.
In contrast, Mary Douglas is raised by her 'rational, cheerful, sweettempered' aunt, a woman with a 'noble and highly gifted mind' who voluntarily gave up her first passionate love when it met with her female guardian's disapproval and instead married a man whom she has found enduringly compatible and sensible. Inspired by her aunt's benevolence, rationality, and devotion to a Christian ethic of care, Mary learns to control her emotions, to respond to the needs of the poor and the sick, and to worship devoutly. Rejecting the marriage arranged by her mother with the wealthy man-of-fashion, Lord Glenallen, Mary-through her devoted care of the blind, lonely Mrs. Lennox-wins the devotion -334- of Charles Lennox, a wise, handsome, loving young Colonel who respects Mary's virtues and shares her capacity for benevolence and lasting love.
While Ferrier's novel overtly endorses the 'happy Marriage' of Mary Douglas and Charles Lennox as providing 'as much happiness as earth's pilgrims ever possess,' it implies a more subversive and revolutionary domestic ideology than that suggested by Mary's insistence that she will 'never marry, unless I marry a man on whose judgment I could rely for advice and assistance, and for whom I could feel a certain deference that I consider due from a wife to her husband.' Ferrier insistently associates this «happy» marriage with death-Mary and Colonel Lennox plight their troth over the deathbed of his mother, and Sir Sampson dies on their wedding day, leaving them the inheritance they need to live. Moreover, Colonel Lennox is portrayed in such an idealized, bland, stereotypical way that the reader knows he has failed to engage the author's imagination.
The novelist's own sympathies-and the modern reader's-lie not only with Mary but also, and perhaps more strongly, with her cousin Emily Lindore. Raised within the dissipated household of her vain, apathetic father and Aunt Juliana, she has remained 'insupportably natural and sincere,' becoming at the same time independent and willful, clever and insightful. While she lacks the religious training and consequently the benevolence and sympathy that Mary has learned from her Aunt Douglas, Emily engages us by her wit and by her refusal to submit to her Aunt Juliana's petty tyrannies. Emily has long loved her cousin Edward Douglas despite his faults, which she clearly sees: 'he was handsome, brave, good-hearted, and good-humoured, but he was not clever.' Their marriage is one of greater equality than is Mary's, for Edward's patriarchal privileges will be more than matched by Emily's superior intelligence. To Mary's belief that a woman must defer to her husband, Emily responds:
Now, I flatter myself, my husband and I shall have a more equitable division: for though a man is a reasonable being, he shall know and own that woman is so too-sometimes. All things that men ought to know better, I shall yield: whatever may belong to either sex, I either seize upon as my prerogative or scrupulously divide…
While Mary is the ostensible heroine of the novel who wins all her arguments with Emily and attains the husband that Emily half desires, — 335- Emily is the voice of shrewd, worldly female intelligence. Her utterances sparkle with the same energy and comic wit that enliven Ferrier's personal letters, suggesting that she is in part a projection of the author. And Emily's choice of a husband whose faults she knows and can tolerate, a husband who remains devoted to her and admires her, suggests that Ferrier endorsed more egalitarian marriages than those described by Hannah More. To find other powerful examples of such egalitarian marriages we have only to look to the fiction of Charlotte Smith (especially the marriage of Lionel
In the fiction of feminine Romanticism, such egalitarian marriages, and the lasting domestic harmony they can bring, grow out of rational love rather than sexual passion, especially where the women are concerned. Female Romantic novelists almost all endorsed Wollstonecraft's claim in Vindication of the Rights of Woman that
one grand truth women have yet to learn, though much it imports them to act accordingly. In the choice of a husband, they should not be led astray by the qualities of a lover-for a lover the husband, even supposing him to be wise and virtuous, cannot long remain.
Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship-into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care.
Maria Edgeworth opposed passionate erotic love, which she defined as that «liberty» which uneducated girls equate with 'escape from habitual restraint to exercise their own will, no matter how,' both in her life-she declined her only proposal of marriage (from the Swedish diplomat Edelcrantz, a man with whom she was, according to her sister, 'exceedingly in love') to remain with her father and siblings in Ireland-and in her fiction. In her
In contrast, the prudent Caroline achieves Wollstonecraft's and Edgeworth's ideal of a non-eroticized domestic life, defined in a 'Letter from a Gentleman' (modeled on Richard Lovell Edgeworth) as
the pleasure which men of science and literature enjoy in an union with women, who can sympathise in all their thoughts and feelings, who can converse with them as equals, and live with them as friends; who can assist them in the important and delightful duty of educating their children; who can make their family their most
