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This novel starts with the arrival of Mrs Maitland and her daughters, Catharine and Helen, to a lodging house in London owned by Betsy and Billy Saunders. Catharine and Helen differ from one another in the same way as do Austen's Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Catharine being serious and ruled by a perhaps excessive sense of rectitude, and Helen being more spontaneous. As Betsy correctly surmises, her new tenants are related to Captain Kenneth Maitland, now deceased. Betsy and Billy knew Kenneth Maitland in his early life when he was the favoured second son of Lord Winterdale. They had both worked on the estate of the grand family and Billy, whilst at sea, had lost his leg in the same battle in which Captain Maitland was killed.
Through Betsy, we learn that Kenneth Maitland was much revered and esteemed by family, friends and servants alike. However, he fell in love with the very beautiful daughter of the local bailiff and his family did not approve of the match. In the end they ran away to Scotland and got married, this action resulting in his being ostracized from his family for the rest of his life. Mrs Maitland was that bailiff's beautiful daughter, now the widow of Captain Maitland; Catharine and Helen are their daughters. Mrs Maitland is very ill and has come to London to secure her daughters' future after her death. To this end, she writes to Admiral Boscawen at Great George Street asking for his help.
The admiral was close to Captain Maitland in the Navy and also knows Lady Glencairn, Maitland's sister and the only remaining heir. Mrs Maitland asks the admiral to appeal to Lady Glencairn, hoping that she will forgive her late brother's actions and take her nieces back into the family. The admiral promises his help and also promises that if he fails with Lady Glencairn, he will personally take on the care of the two girls as if they were his own.
Before Lady Glencairn's forgiveness can be sought, Mrs Maitland dies. Catharine and Helen go to live with the admiral, where they are cared for in their grief. He solicits help from his sister Dorothy, who is slightly eccentric and lavishes love and care upon animals, and Frederic St. Clair, a young man who is also his adopted ward and who may be his actual son. The girls become much loved in the household and there is hope that Frederic may marry one of them.
Although the admiral stalls at writing to Lady Glencairn because he wants to keep the girls with him, he finally does write to her, and, on her return from her estate in Scotland, she agrees to have the sisters live with her at St. James Square. Lady Glencairn accedes not from a sense of duty towards her orphaned nieces but more because of social pride: She cannot allow a blood relation to be supported by another, especially if the persosn supporting her relatins has a high class status that authorizes the social recognition of those relations, as is the case with the admiral's protection of Catharine and Helen. Before leaving the admiral, the sisters promise to stay in close contact. Helen, his preferred choice, is given a ring and asked not to take it off for a ring of betrothal without his consent. He secretly wants a match between Frederic and Helen, who seem very well suited.
Lady Glencairn expects her nieces to be rustic and uneducated and is surprised when they turn out to be lovely accomplished young ladies. Although she doesn't appear outwardly to have much affection for her nieces, she does become quite fond of them. She is an ambitious woman and decides that she wants good marriages for Catharine and Helen - meaning marriages that bring them wealth and high status - and much of the rest of the novel concerns their loves and eventual marriages. She is so concerned with arranging good marriages for those in her care that she even marries a man she does not love, Lord Rochfort, to forward these matches: she hopes that her agreeing to marry him may bring him to agree to a match between one of his daughters and her ward, Isidore Wentworth, the illegitimate son of her late husband by an Italian noblewoman. However misguided she is in valuing marriages of interest over marriages based in love, she is not selfish in her approach to them: her marriage to Lord Rochfort in fact compromises the potential for her to marry the man she really loves, William Delaford, when he later becomes single. Although there is never any chance that he might marry her - he does not love her in the way she loves him - her selflessness in her marriage of interest remains, and she never abuses her marriage vows to a man she esteems but cannot romantically love.
Helen secretly is the preferred choice of Frederic St. Clair and just before he leaves to go to sea, he declares his love to her. She admits that she does care for him but says that she wants her freedom for now and doesn't want a husband who goes to sea, as his profession will disrupt marital life and may lead to his death, in battle. Helen neither fully rejects nor accepts Frederic at this point, although she does promise that she won't encourage anyone else until his return.
During his absence, gradually Helen realizes she does love Frederic. There are other parties interested in her. The first, Lord Charles, is a good man and the brother of a friend; she gently lets him down. The next is the ghastly Lord Beaumont, her aunt's choice. Her forced betrothal to him makes her ill, which leads Lady Glencairn to allow the wedding to be postponed. Frederic returns and eventually Lady Glencairn approves of Helen and Frederic's match, especially when she learns that the admiral is giving Frederic a larger fortune than Lord Beaumont would bring to the marriage. Helen and Frederic marry and have a son.
Catharine's story is more complicated. As children, Helen and she were great friends with a family called the Delafields. They grew up with William Delafield, the man that Lady Glencairn comes to love, and his sister Olivia. In their teen years, Catharine and William discover their love for one another. William goes abroad, but before he leaves, he and Catharine exchange parting gifts and promise to be true to each other. Olivia and her father shortly thereafter face financial ruin, because the father has sqaundered the family fortune gambling, and they move away.
Four years later, William returns to find that his father and sister are living in poverty and debt, and that his father is perhaps suicidal. An opportunity arises that can restore the family to their former status, but it involves William marrying a very elderly duchess. This he does out of filial duty, even though he loves Catharine and has promised to remain true to her. The marriage causes scandal in society. Shame prevents William and Olivia from keeping in contact with their old friends and Catharine feels she has been betrayed and is heartbroken.
When Catharine and Helen move to their aunt's home, they find themselves again in the same social circle as William and Olivia. Helen has sympathy for their position, whilst Catharine cannot forgive William and acts coldly. In due course, however, Catharine relents, especially after she becomes a friend of William's elderly wife and understands that their relationship is similar to that of mother and son. We learn that she has married William because her late husband's will stipulated that she must wed the recipient of her charity, and she wants to help the impoverished Delafields; given the requirements of the will, however, she must marry one of them to help them. She tells William after the marriage that she desires only that he not pursue other women during her life and that he give her filial respect and concern; she in fact gets such filial love and attention not only from William but from his sister Olivia as well. Lady Delafield, observing William and Catharine's feelings for each other, tells each of them separately that after her death, they should seek happiness in each other; just as the admiral gives Helen a ring which she only exchanges for a wedding ring with the man the admiral wants her to marry, Lady Delafield gives Catharine a bracelet, which to her symbolizes the wedding ring she wants Catharine later to accept from William. Eventually Lady Delafield dies, giving William his freedom. He goes to Catharine and she confesses that she still loves him and with time their relationship is repaired. They plan to marry.
There are a number of smaller subplots in this text. First, there is the interesting rags-to- riches story of the elderly Lady Delafield which provides reasoning for her marriage to the very much younger William; a peasant's daughter, she had agreed to marry the ugly, deformed Lord Delafield at her friends' urging and always attended him with esteem. She fell in love with another man after she married but they separated to keep themselves from indulging a criminal love. He returns after her husband's death, broken from seeking his fortune in the East Indies (and failing to get it), and dies. This is highly ironic because in the short period between her husband's dying and her lover's dying, her lover would have been an appropriate recipient of her fortune-through-marriage. Another subplot involves the history of Isidore Wentworth, the adopted son of Lady Glencairn. He eventually marries Olivia. There is also the story of Lady Glencairn's attraction to William Delafield and marriage to Lord Rochfort and the secret love between Lord Rochfort's daughter Louisa and Edward Beresford. All the younger characters, then, ultimately are able to marry for love; their doing so in no way means marrying poorly, in Lady Glencairn's view: everyone ends up with money and high social status.
We also have recounted to us the lives of some comical characters: Mrs Betsy Saunders; Nanny, a servant; and Grace Kingsland, the companion to Lady Glencairn. The last is a silly, prying woman whose indiscretion is punished in a prank involving her kidnap in a carriage - not dissimilar to that suffered by Madame Duval in Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778). All the spinster characters except for Dorothy Boscawen wish to wed; it is this desire, and vanity, that leads Grace into her indiscretion. Nanny, on the other hand, does wed.
Last, we have a madwoman in the novel in the form of a tenant of Ivy cottage (Catherine and Helen's childhood home) called Miss Douglas. She has lost her mind through grief, having lost her sweetheart and two brothers in the Battle of Waterloo.
© 1998 Louise Watkins / Julie Shaffer / Sheffield Hallam University
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