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East Lynne (Oxford World's Classics) PDF

695 Pages·2008·1.63 MB·English
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oxford world’s classics EAST LYNNE Ellen Wood, or ‘Mrs Henry Wood’ as she styled herself for professional purposes, was born in 1814. She lived with her grand- parents until the age of 7 when she rejoined her parents and six siblings. An adolescent spinal problem, confining her to a couch, allowed her to share the education her brothers received from their father, a glove manufacturer of scholarly turn. In 1836 she married Henry Wood, spent the next twenty years in France where Henry had business interests, and bore three sons and two daughters. Her first contribution to a magazine appeared in February 1851 and during the next decade she published another 150 or so short stor- ies. Meanwhile, in the wake of Henry’s business failure, the family had returned to England in 1856, and settled in Upper Norwood. Herfirst novel, Danesbury House (1860), won a prize of £100 from the Scottish Temperance League, and her second, the sensational shocker, East Lynne (1860–1), was an immediate popular success, and became a staple melodrama of the Victorian stage and early twentieth-century cinema. After her husband’s death in 1866, Ellen moved to Hampstead and became both proprietor and editor of the Argosy magazine, in which she launched eleven more of her own novels and the successful ‘Johnny Ludlow’ tales of her Worcestershire childhood. A martyr to ill-health, Wood nevertheless left a substantial amount of work for posthumous publication when she died in 1887. Elisabeth Jay is Professor of English and Assistant Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University. Her published work includes a literary biography of Margaret Oliphant; various editions of biographies, autobiographies, and novels by Victorian women writers; and a series of books on nineteenth-century literature and religion. oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles––from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS ELLEN WOOD East Lynne Edited with an Introduction and Notes by ELISABETH JAY 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in OxfordNew York AucklandCape TownDar es SalaamHong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur MadridMelbourneMexico City Nairobi New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto With offices in ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece GuatemalaHungary ItalyJapan South KoreaPoland Portugal SingaporeSwitzerlandThailandTurkeyUkraineVietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial matter © Elisabeth Jay 2005 First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280462–6 135 79108642 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc., Suffolk CONTENTS Introduction vii Note on the Text xl Select Bibliography xliv A Chronology of Ellen Wood xlvii EAST LYNNE Explanatory Notes 625 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue. East Lynne as Sensation Fiction In 1862 Oxford’s 47-year-old Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, was reluctantly persuaded to accompany the 20-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, on a trip to Egypt. Their fundamental incompatibility was remarked by Stanley’s Victorian biographer: ‘Few young men of twenty would have appreciated Stanley’s insatiable appetite for every detail of historical or sacred associations––an appetite so absorbing as to leave little room for sympathy with their very different interests.’ HRH, however, devised a way of turning Stanley’s scholarly proclivities to more amusing account: The Prince set his mind on my reading ‘East Lynne,’ which I did at three sittings. Yesterday I stood a tolerable examination at it. A brisk cross- examination took place between H.R.H., A.P.S., Meade, and Keppel. I came off with flying colours, and put a question which no one could answer: ‘With whom did Lady Isabel dine on the fatal night?’1 Stanley’s ability to consume the novel at three sittings and the Poirot-like mode in which he posed his tricky question (for the answer to his question consult Chapter 27) might suggest that East Lynne (1861) was a story of crime and detection and the novel does indeed introduce a murder that requires solving, but the ‘fatal night’ to which Stanley referred involves the novel’s central misdemeanour, a social crime so shocking that it will eventually attract the death penalty which the mere act of murder is excused. One of the first, and one of the most famous, of the 1860s outcrop of ‘sensation fiction’, East Lynne incorporated many of the facets that won this genre its derogatory nickname. A category broad enough to incorporate novels as diverse as Wilkie Collins’s The 1 R. E. Prothero and G. G. Bradley, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1893), ii. 67–9. viii Introduction Woman in White (1860), Charles Dickens’sGreat Expectations (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), or Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower (1867), is always going to be hard to define coherently, but critics of the day found it easy enough to identify the common features they disliked and distrusted. This type of fiction was denominated ‘sensational’ because it played upon readers’ nerves in two ways: first, by using to the full the opportunity for suspense and melodrama afforded by serial instalments; and second, by stimulat- ing an ‘unhealthy’ interest in the diseases and crimes––such as adul- tery, abduction, insanity or falsely alleged insanity, arson, bigamy, and the crime passionel––which the newspapers claimed threatened society daily. Perceived as playing promiscuously with discrete nar- rative traditions, ‘sensation fiction’ further offended by infiltrating the concerns of the cheap press into the genteel reading circles of middle- and upper-class Britain. The appeal of East Lynne, it might be said, lay in its ability to entrance readers with the appal- lingly immoral consequences of ignoring traditional social boundar- ies (Lady Isabel Vane, a peer’s daughter, is apparently genetically incapable of communicating successfully with Archibald Carlyle, her middle-class lawyer husband) while serving up this feast of horrors with a seductively conventional moral commentary. Thus Isabel’s kinsman, Lord Mount Severn, is duly summoned by the author to spell out to the ruined Lady Isabel the full gravity of her offence, but only some chapters after readers have been allowed to experience her growing estrangement from her husband, and the way in which her jealousy of a supposed rival is whipped into a fatal frenzy by the practised seducer, Sir Francis Levison. Lord Mount Severn is par- ticularly careful to direct Isabel and the reader’s attention to the widespread social chaos that her adultery with a minor aristocrat could cause: ‘Coward! sneak! May good men shun him, from hence- forth! may his Queen refuse to receive him! You, an earl’s daughter! Oh, Isabel! How utterly you have lost yourself!’ (p. 308) As we have seen, his prayer was in one sense to be in vain. While Ellen Wood, the novel’s author, was busy invoking the Queen as the absolute arbiter of moral and social authority, the Queen’s son and heir, Prince Edward, had become thoroughly intimate with the cow- ardly sneak and the fallen earl’s daughter, and had thought them fit company to be introduced to the future Dean of Westminster, Introduction ix Arthur Stanley. Such a reading, it might be objected, stems from deliberately confusing real life with fiction, but this approach charac- terized the criticism levelled in the 1860s against the new phenom- enon of the ‘sensation novel’.2 In April 1863 Henry Mansel, later Dean of St Paul’s, sought to identify for the readers of the conserva- tive Quarterly Review the essential ingredients contributing to the ‘morbid ... excitement’ worked by such fiction and lighted upon the dangerous sense of social promiscuity it conveyed: The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation ... [A] tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thor- oughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting. ... The man who shook our hand with a hearty English grasp half an hour ago––the woman whose beauty and grace were the charm of last night, and whose gentle words sent us home better pleased with the world and with ourselves––how exciting to think that under these pleasing outsides may be concealed some demon in human shape...3 It was such ‘proximity’, the sense that such demons might be at large in one’s immediate social milieu or, even more frighteningly, in one’s own home, which distinguished this wave of novels from their ‘exciting’ predecessor, the Gothic novel. As Henry James phrased it, in contrasting that ur-Gothic text, Ann Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of Udolpho (1784), with the works of Ellen Wood’s rivals, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: ‘What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more terrible.’4 Deprived of an exotic setting, ‘sensation novels’ had instead to rely upon ‘piquant situation and startling incident’5 to evoke awe, and once again it was the notion of proximity that caused concern. 2 See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),54ff. 3 Henry L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’,Quarterly Review,113 (April 1863),481–514 (pp. 488–9). 4 Henry James’s review of Mary Braddon’sAurora Floyd was originally published in The Nation, 12 Oct. 1865; it was reprinted in Henry James, Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921),108–16. 5 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’,Blackwood’s Magazine,91 (1862),564–84 (p. 568).

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When the aristocratic Lady Isabel abandons her husband and children for her wicked seducer, more is at stake than moral retribution. Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and promiscuit
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