Young Jane Austen and the First Canadian Novel: From Emily Montague to "Amelia Webster" and Love and Freindship

Abstract

Young Jane Austen and the First Canadian Novel: From Emily Montague to "Amelia Webster" and Love and Freindship Juliet McMaster Historians of Canadian literature often call Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague of 1769 the first Canadian novel. Though it was published in England and written by an Englishwoman, Frances Brooke spent the years 1763 to 1768 in Québec, and drew extensively on her experience there for her novel, the first and besthalf ofwhich is vividly set in Lower Canada. Emily Montague1 is no mean literary achievement. Ithas alively heroine, Arabella Fermor (there is further play on the allusion to the original of Pope's Belinda, although this Arabella is firmly Protestant) and a sentimental heroine, Emily Montague—a kind of contrast that recalls Richardson 's vivacious Anna Howe and serious Clarissa Harlowe, as well as looking forwardto Austen's Marianne andElinorDashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax; it has a well-developed sense of location; and it incorporates strong female characters and a vigorous feminist stand. It is an epistolary novel, and pays marked attention to 1 Frances Brooke, The History ofEmily Montague (1769), New Canadian Library no. 27 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961). References are to this edition and appear as EM. The novel has recently been reprinted by the same press, with an afterword by Lorraine McMullen (1995). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 340 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the necessary hiatuses in communication between Lower Canada and England , allowing time not only for transatlantic sailing, but also for the winter freeze-up ofthe St Lawrence River. That is, while Brooke takes on the epistolary convention with its frequent strains on credibility, she is businesslike and convincing in following through on the consequences of her choice. Even today it is a good read, thanks to the vivacity of one heroine, the social and topographical interest of the story, and the rapid pace of the narrative. Nevertheless, by the time Jane Austen took the pen into her hands in the late 1780s, a sentimental epistolary novel of 1769 inevitably seemed dated, and to "a mind lively and at ease" it must have called for parody. Young Austen, as I believe, answered the call; and Emily Montague seems to me a strong candidate as the novel most aptly parodied in her wild little fiction "Amelia Webster" from Volume the First, as well as a prominent target, among others, for her exuberant take-off of the sentimental novel, Love and Freindship, from Volume the Second. I will address the parallels one by one. I am aware that it is not always easy for a reader to follow a set of parallels and variations paraded by a reader familiar with both texts, and that such a parade can become tedious. Pointing out parodie connections, moreover, can be perilously like explaining a joke. My defence is that we know there are many jokes in Austen's works that inevitably pass us by, as her literary and historical contexts recede from us; and that it can be enjoyable to rediscover them. The brilliance of a parody such as Love and Freindship lies largely in the fact that it is wonderfully funny even if you do not know exactly what is being parodied, because Austen allows us to reconstruct the fictions she bounces off. A reader who does not know The Mysteries of Udolpho can still laugh at Northanger Abbey; but the reader who does know it finds an extra dimension of pleasure. And I suggest that knowledge of Emily Montague can similarly enhance our enjoyment of the parodies of Austen's teenage years, "Amelia Webster" and Love and Freindship. Frances Brooke's full-length epistolary novel Emily Montague contains the courtship and marriage of three separate couples: the heroine's to the hero, the secondary heroine's to the secondary hero, and the hero's sister to his friend. Exactly the same could be said of Jane Austen's minimalist epistolary novel, "Amelia Webster," though it occupies no more than twoand -a-half pages in the Chapman edition. As with Austen's breathless dramatic version of Sir Charles Grandison, brevity is a major part of...