Helen
THANKS
Thanks to Dr Katherine MacDonald and Miranda Davies for expert help in translating and compiling the footnotes; to Nikky Twyman for proofreading; Gabriella Jaffe for inputting; Peter Dyer for design; and John Mullan for his introduction and encouragement.
HELEN 
MARIA EDGEWORTH
Introduced by John Mullan
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Title Page
Introduction by John Mullan
HELEN : A Novel in Three Parts
Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three
Also published by Sort of Books
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
by John Mullan
This is a book about lying. Maria Edgeworth, its author, was a supremely worldly and intelligent novelist, who was interested not in lies that are told in malice (though there are these too in the novel), but in the lies a woman tells to those whom she loves. Though it begins as if it were a novel of courtship, destined to end with the happy betrothal of its heroine, Helen, it soon becomes something more audacious: the story of Helen’s friend Lady Cecilia Clarendon, and the crumbling of her marriage. Readers of Edgeworth’s near-contemporary Jane Austen will recognize some things: the drawing-room jousts, the female rivalries, the comedy of manners. Yet Helen looks forward to later nineteenth-century novels of marital discontent or disaster. It was Edgeworth’s last completed novel, at the end of a successful career, and has both the polish of achievement and the energy of something experimental.
It seems extraordinary that such a sophisticated novel should long have been available only in secondhand shops or university libraries. Early nineteenth-century readers thought of Maria Edgeworth as the leading woman novelist of the day. Jane Austen acknowledges one of her novels, along with two of Fanny Burney’s, in a famous vindication of modern fiction in Chapter V of Northanger Abbey. She names Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) as one of those works that have proved the intellectual power, the insight and the wit to be found in the best novels. When Austen herself began publishing with Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Edgeworth was the most widely admired and best remunerated living novelist. Her work was respectfully reviewed; it also sold very well. We know just how much she earned from her books because she kept a list, rightly believing that copyright prices were the best measure of an author’s standing. She received over £1000 for Tales of Fashionable Life (2nd series) and over £2000 for Patronage. These were very large sums: £500 might be a good income for a professional gentleman with a family to support. Edgeworth’s fame had faded somewhat by the time of Helen, which was completed when she was in her sixties. Yet her publisher Richard Bentley still paid her £1100 for the three volumes (a sum adroitly negotiated by her friend J.G. Lockhart, Walter Scott’s son-in-law).
Maria Edgeworth was an extraordinary woman. Her father was the Irish landowner, politician and self-styled intellectual Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Maria became his protégée, and from him she inherited an interest in education and a cosmopolitan bookishness. She tutored some of her many siblings and published works on education, notably her Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), advocating women’s education. Her novels, beginning with the hilarious Castle Rackrent in 1800, increased her renown and, despite living mostly on the family estate in rural Ireland, she came to know leading writers of the day such as Jeremy Bentham, Sir Humphrey Davy and Sir Walter Scott. (In Helen, Lady Davenant gives a sketch of Scott’s person and manners that is really Edgeworth’s own). She was herself a literary celebrity: well read, well traveled, and thoroughly intellectual. You can hear Edgeworth’s sophistication in her narrative voice, for she is certainly present in her novel, coolly judging the characters whom she has set in motion. Describing how the bitchy Lady Katrine foolishly supposes herself likely to snare Horace Churchill in marriage, she typically asks us to notice how often ‘hope increases as all probability of success decreases’. But she cannot stop there. ‘This aberration of the intellect is usually to be observed to be greatest in very clever women’, she adds. She has seen all this before. Edgeworth offered – and still offers – her readers the pleasure of being in worldly and enlightened company. It is also highly literary company. Her characters like to lob quotes at each other, and are sometimes enjoyably absurd for doing so, but the novelist herself loves her allusions. Literature-lovers will enjoy spotting the quotations. In particular, anyone with a liking for the sharp glitter of Alexander Pope’s satirical verse will find plenty of his lines gleaming from the narrative.
In some ways, however, Helen is less high-minded than Edgeworth’s earlier novels. She felt it worth pointing out that this was a novel ‘depending more on the development of various characters and on the interest excited by Helen herself than on any particular point or moral’. Didactic design was implicit in many of the titles of early nineteenth-century novels by women, where abstract nouns abounded. Edgeworth published Ennui and Patronage; Mary Brunton produced Self-Control and Discipline; Susan Ferrier, Marriage and Destiny. Austen, of course, wrote three novels whose titles apparently proclaim their designs, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion (even if her admirers find that the novels themselves undermine moralistic intent). Edgeworth was clearly serious in attempting to escape lesson-teaching. In Helen the protagonist has a moral guide, the formidable Lady Davenant, who is gifted with many of the author’s own insights. But she is as much an interrogator as an adviser. For Lady Davenant, moral scruple is the female province. It is for women to worry about the ethics of everyday life. When her husband Lord Davenant arrives from London, to interrupt one of her sagacious conversations with the heroine, she exclaims amusedly, ‘Now for politics – farewell morality, a long farewell.’
Helen is a novel of two halves: the first a study of manners and narrative of conversations, the second an accelerating drama of marital distrust. Part of the pleasure of the second half is in recognizing how this drama has been prepared in apparently incidental episodes early in the novel. It would spoil things for the reader to point these out in an introduction, except to say that Cecilia’s fibs are introduced with beguiling harmlessness. Much of the time it seems that amused, clever dialogue is an end in itself for the novelist. The social milieu she depicts is unabashedly patrician. Helen, who was preparing herself for a quietly genteel life with the local vicar and his wife, finds herself thrust into grand company at Clarendon Park, Lord and Lady Davenant’s country house. At one stage there is even a weekend’s hawking party. This was the period of ‘silver fork’ fiction, novels of fashionable, upper-class society that were hugely popular with readers who did not themselves belong to this class. Some of them were written by actual aristocrats; all purported to give an insider’s account of a gilded, usually scandalous, world. Edgeworth is sensitive to this fashion. She herself moved in high society in the 1820s and 1830s. Certainly there is a kind of respect for social standing shown by this novelist of liberal sympathies that one would never expect from the supposedly conservative Jane Austen.
Indeed, politeness is so elegantly exercised that the reader is likely to warm to those vulgar or tactless enough to break its surface. The jumped-up Lady Bearcroft is one such. Her apparently blundering conversation often contains gems of satire. Professing her respect for the superbly grand Lady Davenant, she observes, ‘even her pride I like – it well became her – birth and all, for I hear she is straight from Charlemagne’. In the pressing silence of a formidably refined tea, to which various political potentates have been invited, it is she who wonderfully acknowledges the overwhelming awkwardness of the occasion. ‘Amazing entertaining we are! So many clever people got together too, for what?’ It is a good question. A few moments later she finds herself laughing so much at the pained gravity of the other ladies’ countenances that she has to run from the room. She uses deliciously incorrect words (‘coggledy’, ‘boggle-de-botch’) with a happy sense of their incongruity: ‘when people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms’.
Nothing very bad seems likely to happen at Clarendon Park. When the novel moves with its heroine to London, however, the mood shifts decisively. To the reader’s (and perhaps the novelist’s) private delight, London high society is evidently nasty and scandal-addicted. The first metropolitan occasion is Lady Castlefort’s party, where Helen and Beauclerc arrive as expectant guests to encounter a world of stage whispers and knowing glances. It is quite a baptism. Most of the women at this do seem to cluster to exchange choice slanders. In an inner room Lady Katrine Hawksby stirs the cauldron of her malice with her scandalmongering confidantes. At a fashionable London picture sale, a story about the amorous provenance of a certain locket is told ‘for the amusement of the whole room’ by ‘a party of fashionables’. Though names are knowingly avoided, it is Cecilia who is being cheerfully defamed. This is a social world where calumny seems a sport, yet where proprieties are rigidly maintained. An intriguing sub-plot involves the efforts of the cunning Madame de St Cymon, a woman ostracized for some unspecified sexual misdemeanour, to win her way back into high society. Separated from her husband because of a ‘terrible discovery’, she has become a kind of untouchable. She challenges disgrace by using her knowledge of Cecilia’s past into blackmailing her into communication. It is like a glimpse into a Henry James novel.
Just talking to someone can be dangerous. There is a good deal of conversation in the novel, but then we have to judge people from how they talk. As Lady Davenant puts it, ‘if women would avail themselves of their daily, hourly, opportunities of judging people by their words, they would get at the natural characters’. Sometimes you seem to hear the tone of worldly reflectiveness that Edgeworth must have taken from her own evenings in drawing rooms and salons. Commenting on the ‘fireworks’ of Horace Churchill’s satirical conversation, Lady Davenant says, ‘it’s all feu d’artifice after all’ – which dismisses the artificiality of his wit with a witty play upon the meanings of a French phrase. French plays a big part in the novel, a trace of its author’s sophistication. Edgeworth visited Paris in 1802 with her father and was much influenced by French intellectual urbanity. After her return, French literature played almost as important a role in her private reading as books written in English. In 1820 she spent almost a year in France and Switzerland with her stepsisters Fanny and Harriet, including several months in Paris, renting elegant apartments and moving in high society. Edgeworth wrote at length to her stepmother and sisters back in Ireland, detailing her conversations with aristocrats and intellectuals. Her command of French as much as her status as an author was her passport into the best salons.
So a sense of the nuances of French is one of the author’s resources. Describing Horace Churchill’s ill humour one morning, the narrator uses the word that the character himself chooses, journalier; Edgeworth cannot resist adding in parentheses, ‘a French word settles everything’. This is a joke, naturally, about how cultivated people show their subtlety by using French words to indicate that nothing in English precisely quite catches their meaning. Horace Churchill is always flourishing his French, as if he were finding nice words for the cruel things that he always wants to say. When a cash-strapped member of the upperclasses marries someone rich but vulgar, it is, he says, ‘mettre du fumier sur nos terres’ (‘to put dung on our fields’). The overall effect seems irresistibly camp. Coming upon some ladies swapping scandal over tea and punch at a London party, he comments, ‘Tea and ponch’ (he naturally prefers the French word), ‘you know, in London, is now quite à la Française’. But Edgeworth is mocking only a little. She did not have to use so much French and distribute it so widely amongst her characters. When we hear that Cecilia’s lady’s maid Felicie has ‘a certain petite metaphysique de toilette’, the elaborate phrase is suited to the character (French herself, naturally) but also seems an authorial flourish. When Edgeworth wants to explain Lady Castlefort’s behaviour towards Beauclerc, whom she had once fancied as a partner, she tells us that ‘she was not of the violent vindictive sort, with her there was no long-lasting dépit amoreux’, a phrase that translates as ‘the resentment of spurned love’; but why choose French for this? Because it is the language of les amours, and naturally adopted by a sophisticated narrator. The fact that Edgeworth had little amorous experience on which to base her observations – she never married and seems hardly to have had a single romantic attachment – makes the linguistic artfulness all the more necessary.
Yet it is characteristic of Edgeworth’s fictional skill that this linguistic resourcefulness should be used to arouse our suspicions. Even the francophile Horace regrets the sacrifices of candour he has made ‘for this reputation de salon’. It is fun to be able to use French, but perhaps an evasion of honesty. Cecilia loves using French. The truthful Helen understands it very well, but does not use it. General Clarendon’s blunt, good-hearted sister Esther, the one person who sees through Cecilia’s lies, amazes the French by declaring that a just-told anecdote is entirely untrue. Such impolite truthfulness is ‘bien Anglaise’. Parisians are appalled. French phrasing returns us to the ways in which a clever person might avoid truthfulness.
This story about untruthfulness turns on one question: can a woman love more than once? Before marrying, General Clarendon has asked Cecilia, his wife-to-be, ‘if she had ever loved any other man’. Cecilia has taken it that only a firm ‘no’ will win his hand, and has duly given the desired answer. We might remember Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, with her conviction that a person can only love once (even though she is the daughter of her father’s second wife). Cecilia’s assurance is an untruth, since she was once admired by the disreputable Colonel D’Aubigny and appeared (in letters, dangerously enough) to return his endearments. The error is small, we might think. In the verse tale by George Crabbe that gave Edgeworth her idea, ‘The Confidant’, Anna – the equivalent of Cecilia – has had a love affair and an illegitimate child. Cecilia’s secret is a smaller thing. Yet her husband’s very rectitude invests it with huge significance.
We watch Helen being recruited to her friend’s deception, with Edgeworth exploiting her heroine’s unselfishness and making it look like pliability. Yet Cecilia is the one in danger, and in its second half Helen becomes the gripping story of how her lies take her marriage to the brink of destruction. Increasingly fearful of her husband, her every effort to extricate herself involves another untruth. Deception becomes a kind of illness. In a nice twist, there is a moment when Clarendon begins to worry about his wife’s health, and the modern reader assumes that her anxiety about her lies is making her ill. A contemporary reader would have inferred the truth: she is pregnant, and potentially has a new claim on his affections.
While the moralist in Edgeworth seeks to teach a lesson, the novelist in her is simply interested in the ramifying consequences of deceit, as one lie leads to another. Through the third and last volume of the novel, the entanglements become ever more complicated and painful. The clever thing is to begin with an untruth for which the reader finds it easy to forgive Cecilia. Her utterly principled, and therefore utterly daunting, husband-to-be, with his countenance ‘rigid as iron’, has terrified his wife into deception. The code by which he lives, and her own respect for it, may be foreign to us, but the dilemmas it produces are entirely credible. What disgrace might you suffer to save a dear friend from a worse disgrace? What lies would you not tell your husband to protect your marriage? Can you love a man you can so completely deceive? These are the questions that push the reader on to the novel’s dénouement. Can it all possibly end happily? You will have to find out.