Rewriting Romance: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) are novels about novels. Each seems to challenge popular sentimental and Gothic fiction in the same way, by ridiculing or debunking their melodramatic romantic conventions. But Austen’s criticism is far less savage than Hamilton’s, which is unforgiving in its treatment of romance. Austen, by contrast, pokes affectionate fun at romantic formulas to revise without rejecting them, while Hamilton’s very rigidity of purpose makes it difficult for her to maintain a consistency of representation. Even as she attempts to expose the weaknesses of romantic excess, Hamilton frequently finds it necessary to resort to those very conventions in order to heighten the suspense or emotional impact of her own plot. Austen’s more intentionally inclusive approach is not marred by these kinds of inconsistencies, and this difference lends an authority to Austen’s criticism that is somewhat undermined in Hamilton’s. Ultimately, this difference also illuminates the contrast between each author’s sense of her reading public, and the way in which she engages in the act of fiction. Austen’s deft renovation of romantic convention demonstrates a faith in her readers, and in romance, that Hamilton’s more contradictory and inflexible approach precludes. In her anti-Jacobin novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Hamilton’s critique is most squarely aimed at the tenets of the “New” or “Modern Philosophy,” which emerged in the late eighteenth century as a set of revolutionary ideals championed by such radicals as William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Claire Grogan explains that, like many conservative writers, Hamilton worried that this new ideology promoted “selfish, romantically self-indulgent and obsessive behaviour.” By identifying romance as one of the pernicious qualities Hamilton deplores in the “New Philosophy,” Grogan flags the ancillary target of Hamilton’s satire: the novel. In Memoirs the term “novel” is a disapproving label applied strictly to the eighteenth century’s more sensational works of literature: romance, melodrama, sentimental fiction. While Hamilton’s work is primarily seen as a critique of incendiary politics or philosophy, it also attacks such literature on the same grounds as it attacks Jacobin doctrine. Hamilton connects the two as both romanticize “the individual’s rights and caprices,” and she considers that this romanticism can have a dangerously destabilizing effect on a reader; in her later history Memoirs of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus, Hamilton writes of novels that “the brilliant illusions of fancy may affect the sensibility of the heart, and so far captivate the understanding as to render it unwilling to exert itself in detecting the fallacy of arguments which have spoken so powerfully to the feelings.” In Memoirs, Hamilton sets about deflating this romantic fallacy through her narrator’s sarcastic running commentary on the ridiculous implausibility of novelistic conventions. She peppers the novel with moments that seem to promise the dramatic episodes expected by romance readers, and then disappoints those expectations by portraying a more “realistic” version of events. Bridgetina’s coach journey is mundane, contrary to the novelistic commonplace that “an heroine could not travel twenty miles, without encountering so many strange incidents, that the reader no sooner had notice of her having mounted her horse, than his imagination was upon the spur for some great event.” Henry Sydney, young and hardy, recovers steadily from a serious indisposition despite the fact that “a dangerous fit of illness would in his circumstances have been vastly more becoming, and much more natural, in the hero of a novel.” And in the concluding chapter, Hamilton mockingly predicts and then frustrates her reader’s hope that all the characters will be happily married off, claiming a more realistic position for her work than that of …