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The Natural Daughter, with portraits of the Leadenhead Family. A Novel, by Mrs. Robinson. 2 Vols. 12mo. Longman and Rees.
Motto on the Title-page.
'Can such things be,
'Without our special wonder!' SHAKSPEARE [sic]
Indeed, fair Lady, they cannot! and sorry we are to find a genius, capable of soaring to the sublimest subjects in Poetry, and whose former productions, even in the Novel line, communicated innocent amusement and salutary instruction to youthful readers of both sexes, descend to the adoption of that vitiated taste for the marvellous and improbable, which was unfortunately revived in this country by the author of The Monk and The Castle Spectre. In the present performance, every characteristic of a moral Novel is wanting. The title is a misprision of treason against common sense; for every page of the work demonstrates that it ought to have been The Unnatural Wife, Daughter, and Sister; and as to the natural daughter, she is only an infant fly in the cobweb texture of this wonderful and woeful story; of which the following is the outline:
Mr. Alderman Bradford, a wealthy, proud, surly, and capricious citizen, has a wife and two daughters, who make a conspicuous figure in the motley group of the most extraordinary personages that were ever held up to public view as models of existing characters. Part, however, of the sentimental portrait of the Alderman has a degree of merit, which makes some atonement for the absurdity of the plot; and as the colouring may be aptly applied to a great number of similar portraits, we exhibit it as the choicest morceau in the prose composition of the two Volumes: - 'His luxurious life had been the bane of his constitution, and his enormous fortune had deprived him of almost every felicity! Those who have too much power to gratify their inclinations are no less wretched than those who have too little. Satiety is a more uneasy sensation than necessity; and the greatest blessings of life, when fairly appreciated, tend most to shorten our existence. Wealth produces indolence; indolence is the parent of lassitude; and lassitude incapacitates the mind for every human enjoyment. Mr Bradford was wealthy, without being happy; he was weary, though not laborious; he was sad without cause for sorrow; irritable without being crossed in his inclinations; ostentatious without being generous; haughty though not dignified; indefatigable in the toil of disobliging; and, though he lived only for the world, he followed every propensity of his perverse nature in defiance of the world's opinion.'
The two daughters, the principal heroines of the fable, are thus delineated: Martha, the eldest, was giddy, wild, buxom, good-natured, and bluntly severe in the tenor of her conversation. With a face full of dimples, she talked gaily and laughed heartily. She had been educated at a country boarding school, because she was gay, robust, and noisy. Julia, small in stature, fair, delicately formed, humble, obedient, complacent, and accommodating; therefore she was permitted to pass her hours of study under the care of a French Governess at home. Thus prepared for the great world, the sisters started upon society: the gentle Julia admired as a model of feminine excellence, and the unsophisticated Martha considered as a mere masculine hoyden.
Yet, contrary to the usual course of human actions in a civilized country, the gentle Julia, in the career of life, commits crimes that make human nature shudder at the bare recital. Whilst the giddy, wild, good-natured Martha, represented as bluntly sneer in her conversation, withholds from her husband, from a spirit of pride and obstinacy, a secret which, if revealed, would have entitled her to the highest applause, but which, concealed, ruins her reputation in society, separates her from her husband, plunges her into extreme penury, conducts her to the verge of despair, and terminates in the tragic death of her husband, and her subsequent marriage to an admirer of amiable qualities, to whom she had imparted the wonderful secret refused to the repeated importunities of the husband - this is no more nor less than the adoption of the natural daughter, an infant whom she accidentally meets with in a cottage near her husband's mansion, in the arms of its unknown mother. The husband, excited to jealous phrenzy by Julia, suspects the child to be the unlawful fruit of an intrigue between Martha and her paramour, [139] during his absence in a foreign country: and the child, in the sequel, proves to be the daughter of her lover and second husband's sister, who had been fraudulently married at Paris, à la mode revolutionnaire, to her first husband, and by him abandoned; so that, after all, she proves to be his own daughter - and, horror of horrors! he has had another by Julia, and has murdered it. In fine, the chief characters meet together in the strangest manner in different parts of Europe: from Tunbridge they have accidental rencounters at Spa - and the catastrophe closes, all the interested parties being present, in the Mountains of Switzerland!
We regret that the author will not confine her labours to Poetry, in which she superiorly [sic] excels, and has given fresh proofs of it in this Novel, where the reader will find an Ode to Pity, on the death of a soldier slain in battle; another on the flower called the Blue Bell; and two more on different subjects. We must likewise inform the curious, that memoirs of herself, in some trying situations, are introduced into these Volumes, under the fictitious character of Mrs. Sedgley. [complete]
Provided by Julie Shaffer, August 1999.
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