The Heroine

Abstract

Barrett's The Heroine is strongly allusive and the editors have, in general, glossed the text thoroughly and accurately (though some inaccuracies have crept in, ascribing the horror novel Adelaide; Or, The Chateau de St. Pierre to Maria Edgeworth being the most unfortunate). [...]Homer and Zlosnick's introduction proves somewhat problematic. [...]Cherubina's marriage to Robert Stuart (who recommends to her the works of the arch anti-feminist Hannah More) more than crushes the memory of any liberation and draws the reclaimed heroine into the conservative and gendered domestic confines of Pittite Britain (contemporary readers could not but have made the link between Robert Stuart and the ultra-ministerialist Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh).

Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine, Avril Horner & Sue Zlosnik (eds.)

(Kansas: Valancourt Books, 2011)

Despite the renewed interest in Eaton Stannard Barrett (from, amongst others, Gary Kelly and Jim Shanahan), Barrett's novel The Heroine (1813) has not been treated to a modern edition in over eighty years. Prior editions have been somewhat amateurish if enthusiastic. Walter Raleigh's 1909 edition was a plain reprint with a rather weak introduction appended, while Michael Sadleir's 1927 edition lacked the scholarly rigour that this dense text demands. Homer and Zlosnik's edition is therefore, in the main, to be welcomed.

In spite of the fame he obtained during his life, biographical information concerning Barrett is scant. A native of Cork, Barrett went to Trinity College Dublin, graduating (BA) in 1805, two years after Robert Emmet's ill-fated Jacobin insurrection. Securely in the Tory camp, Barrett subsequently removed to London where he was admitted to the Middle Temple. Presumably he did not fulfil his terms as evidence would suggest that he was not called to the bar. In 1807 Barrett secured his first literary success with his poem, All the Talents, a satiric swipe at the coalition government then steering Britain rather ineptly through the Continental Wars. As an ideological ally of satirist and statesman George Canning (to whom The Heroine is dedicated), Barrett's novel quite clearly emerges from that cultural atmosphere typified by Canning's periodical The Anti-Jacobin.

Barrett's The Heroine falls into that not insignificant body of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century fiction that nervously interrogates female readership and authorship. Cherry Wilkinson, daughter of a prosperous but self-made farmer, eagerly imbibes the fantasies of the Radcliffean school. Her brain turned by this diet of reading, Cherry begins to believe herself to be Chembina, an aristocrat kidnapped during infancy. Intent on proving her "real" ancestry, she leaves her father's home for London. Here, she gathers around her an assortment of Jacobin misfits, from a former United Irishman to a poet in the Godwinian mould. After many Quixotic interludes (complete with Reevean backgrounds; crypts, lunatic asylums, subterranean prisons, etc.), she is reclaimed from her delusional state and marries the respectable bourgeois hero, Robert Stuart.

Homer and Zlosnick judiciously choose to reprint the first edition of Barrett's text. They quietly and deftly note the important deletions and additions made by Barrett in his subsequent editions (1814, 1815). Barrett's The Heroine is strongly allusive and the editors have, in general, glossed the text thoroughly and accurately (though some inaccuracies have crept in, ascribing the horror novel Adelaide; Or, The Chateau de St. Pierre to Maria Edgeworth being the most unfortunate).

Moreover, Homer and Zlosnick's introduction proves somewhat problematic. Over two pages they make some guarded but ill-advised conjectures on Barrett's sudden death in 1820. They argue that "given the financial difficulties Barrett experienced [... ] it is quite possible (although yet to be proved) that he fled to America in order to escape his debtors." In order to facilitate this escape, Barrett may "have fake[d] his death" (viii-ix). The evidence given for this hypothesis rests upon the fact that in 1823, the Baltimore periodical The American Farmer published a poem, signed "Eaton Stannard Barrett," addressed to a father on the birth of his third daughter. The daughter in question, however, is in fact Byron's goddaughter, Olivia Moore (bom 1814). This poem, variously attributed by modern scholarship to Joseph Atkinson or Barrett, had been published as far back as 1818 (in the Cork compendium Harmonica), and more than likely it debuted earlier. The American Farmer most probably lifted the poem out of an English or Irish periodical (in line with common early nineteenth century practices). The indisputable fact is that Barrett died in Wales on the 20th of March 1820, something never denied either by his contemporaries nor questioned by any available extant evidence.

Beyond this, Homer and Zlosnik question the extent to which The Heroine ought to be seen as a reactionary text (as Gary Kelly, amongst others, has described it). They argue that Barrett, by allowing Cherubina the freedom of her peregrinations, both affirms the political economy of bourgeois values while simultaneously questioning the validity of their remit: "The Heroine rather cleverly has it both ways: it inscribes the values of the aspiring middle-class (as Kelly argues) but simultaneously exposes the constraints they impose on the imaginative young woman [...] Cherry's adventures imprint quite firmly in the reader's mind an imagined alternative world where women are rabble rousers and property owners and in which Frenchmen and Irishmen represent excitement and change rather than threat" (xix, xxiv). While it is true that, in order ultimately to restrain Cherubina, Barrett must let her loose, he at no time validates, or even casually explores, the possibilities of a liberated woman. While the twenty-first century reader may make such a reading, it is not one sanctioned by Barrett; it exists in spite of the author. The subgenre within which Barrett is working (the Quixotic tale as much as the Gothic) demands he allow the heroine freedom, but only as far as such freedom is shown to be perilous to female existence and female sanity. Barrett's frequent vitriolic allusions to the strong independence of Glorvina (of The Wild Irish Girl, 1806) quite clearly demonstrate his antipathy towards female autonomy. Likewise, Cherubina's marriage to Robert Stuart (who recommends to her the works of the arch anti-feminist Hannah More) more than crushes the memory of any liberation and draws the reclaimed heroine into the conservative and gendered domestic confines of Pittite Britain (contemporary readers could not but have made the link between Robert Stuart and the ultra-ministerialist Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh). In similar manner, Barrett's 1810 poem, Woman, and his 1808 satire, The Miss-Led General, deny women any respectable existence beyond wedded home life and child rearing.

Despite these reservations, this new edition would be useful to various audiences: students of Austen, scholars of Irish Toryism and Irish Jacobinism, and those interested in contemporary accounts of the radical underworld of pre-Waterloo London as well as in the Gothic. Needless to say, Romantic Studies will benefit from this new edition. And lest we forget, The Heroine is also a rather good read. Homer and Zlosnik's edition is reasonably priced at just under twenty dollars.

NIALL GILLESPIE