When Amelia Opie (1769-1853), the most popular novelist of her day, decided to write Adeline Mowbray, based loosely on the tumultuous public relationship of her acquaintances William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she signaled readers with her subtitle that the female characters would receive by far most of her attention.

It features three mother-daughter combinations: that of Mrs. Woodville and her daughter, Editha Mowbray; of Editha Mowbray and her daughter, Adeline Mowbray; and ultimately of Adeline and her own child, named Editha for her grandmother.

Mrs. Woodville, of sensible and logical character, believed her daughter Editha to be a genius. She proved so concerned over her daughter’s upbringing and schooling that she failed to school her at all. Preoccupied by abstracts such as romance, Editha married a man who captured her imagination but did not live long enough to help in the raising of her own daughter Adeline. Age ten when her father died, Adeline would soon be “tormented by the experimental philosophy” of her genius mother. Still, she had her more practical grandmother as a model, and she loved her mother, despite her deficiencies. Those deficiencies were not in the area of affection, and Adeline often remembered her mother’s constant care during a time of childhood illness.

As she matured, Adeline became an aficionado of a social philosophy that held man and woman could share a chaste love outside of the confines of marriage, an idea promoted by the writings of a has-been author named Frederic Glenmurray, intended to be a parallel to Godwin. Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft had eschewed the institution of marriage. When Wollstonecraft delivered her first child, Fanny, by her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, out of wedlock while living in Europe, she had well overstepped the boundaries of propriety set by her community. When she returned to England and took Godwin as her lover, the resultant pregnancy with him moved them both to decide to marry, although they did not live together.

With a second pregnancy while unmarried, Wollstonecraft tempted society’s ire. Thus they discovered what became a major theme of Opie’s novel: that the conflict between life as the ideal and life as commonly accepted proved great. Adeline will also learn this truth and suffer for her independent attitudes. When her new stepfather, Sir Patrick O’Carrol, assumes he can rape her due to her revolutionary views, Adeline gains an idea of her precarious position. Her mother is so smitten with Sir Patrick that she feels Adeline has exaggerated his attentions, and eventually a gulf forms between the two women.

Almost every man Adeline meets becomes aroused when they learn she lives with Glenmurray, many taking liberties that include touching and embracing her. When pregnant with Glenmurray’s child, she suffers rejection by her mother, who had served for so long as her touchstone. Like other members of society, Editha drew a sharp line separating theory from practice. Adeline loses that child but begins to realize that motherhood changes her ideas regarding marriage.

Adeline attracts a long string of admirers, beginning with Colonel Mordaunt, who pursues Adeline throughout her relationship with Glenmurray, once even rescuing her from the unwanted attentions of others. A libertine, he is nevertheless taken aback when he learns at one point that Adeline has at last married Glenmurray’s cousin Berrendale, following Glenmurray’s debt-ridden death, apologizing for his inappropriate actions while addressing a married woman.

When Adeline has Berrendale’s child, she names her daughter for her now-deceased mother, Editha, and will eventually take solace in the comfort of a supportive community, albeit a small one.

Adeline’s group includes Mrs. Pemberton, Emma Douglas, and the mulatto Savannah, and one supportive man, her lifelong physician and sentimental friend, Dr. Norberry. These individuals contrast with the more “respectable” Mrs. Norberry, Mrs. Beauclerc, Mrs. Wallington, and Miss Emily Maynard, all of Adeline’s own social class and all too judgmental to associate with her. When such pillars of the community discover Adeline’s past, she is removed from a teaching post where she had previously been widely praised, and only at that point marries Berrendale.

Autobiographical figures in addition to Godwin and Wollstonecraft likely inspired various Opie characters. The figure of Savannah may be based on a person with that name from Opie’s background. Her mother, Amelia Briggs, was orphaned at age eight while in India and returned to England accompanied by a Black nurse named Savannah who could not adjust to Europe and elected to return to Bengal.

Opie spent a lifetime interested in issues involving Blacks, and when she later became a member of the Society of Friends, worked for abolition of slavery, attending the famous London Convention of 1840, which would galvanize Americans, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to support suffrage for all. Rachael Pemberton represents many of the practical and peaceful ideas of the Quaker movement, most especially that of compassion. Emma Douglas represents a small number of women in Opie’s own society who, due to a plain appearance, do not feel pressure to participate in the commodification of women, where each trades on her beauty and charm in a patriarchal society. They could nurture their intellect and, if not wholly agreeing with revolutionary ideas such as sex outside of wedlock, could intelligently consider and discuss society’s limits and their need for expansion.

Adeline Mowbray moved many who read it, with two interpretations arising from their reading—one camp saw Opie as legitimizing marriage in the end while others saw the opposite. The truth likely fell somewhere between those poles. Opie sought to problematize her community’s simplistic view of the two genders as possessed by desires so different that they could never be satisfactorily resolved, certainly not in the name of morality.

The book remains readily available and widely studied by feminist critics and other appreciators of women’s literature.

Bibliography

King, Shelley, and John B. Pierce. Introduction to Adeline Mowbray, by Amelia Opie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, vii–xxxii.

Spender, Dale. “Amelia Opie and the Novel of Ideas.” In Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora Books, 1986, 315–323.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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