Helen (Mothers of the novel)

The title of my review may not make sense to readers unfamiliar with the four novels of Frances Burney, nor a bit of biography about the two great women authors, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. Both Burney's Camilla and Edgeworth's Helen are later works of fiction produced after earlier successes. Both were published after a long break in time in writing. Both are perhaps "overworked," and in reading both, I often think of how much anxiety the heroines exhibit, and I sense anxiety in the authors in themselves being expressed in subtle ways in text. Both texts have great strengths, yet if they are read after the greater works of the authors (Evelina, Cecilia, Belinda, Patronage, The Absentee, Ennui), there is a sad sense of lost compactness, lost power. Both Camilla and Helen are longer than they need be, and I suspect their length is the result of excessive rewriting and anxiety on the part of the two authors. Yet having said that, I would argue that second-rate Edgeworth is superior to a great many authors' best efforts. Helen is at heart a story about friendship and betrayal, selflessness and selfishness, social lies and their cost. As usual, once I start to try to narrow down a theme of Edgeworth's, more and more lessons on life and great human issues emerge from her writing. Edgeworth understands people and the social games they play, and this perceptive power is still fresh and relevant in 2004. The role of women in politics, political intrigue, and power is an important theme in the book; here some women will struggle with Edgeworth's ambiguity and long for the absolute world of Mary Wollstonecraft. But Edgeworth tackles issues on a practical level-unlike Wollstonecraft she is not able to say, "This is how it should be," but rather Edgeworth explores issues in social context. She shows us behavior and the diverse reactions of people in society, leads us to look at different values, different lifestyles. There is in all of Edgeworth's novels, a level of common sense and the way of the world that keeps her novels from becoming too didactic, too formulaic, too visionary, and too melodramatic. Just as things seem to become too serious, too moral, or (horrors!) boring, Edgeworth makes us laugh at the silly ways people try to protect or feed their vanity, self-esteem, or social reputation.