Had her short life not ended tragically by death in childbirth, Mary Brunton might have greatly expanded her volume of work, which influenced writers as important as Jane Austen. Austen praised Brunton’s first novel, Self Control, wondering in print whether she might ever reach its excellence with her own writing. With Brunton’s additional two novels, Discipline (1815) and Emmeline (1819, posthumous), Self Control takes its place in the group of works deemed crucial to a women’s writing tradition and valued by feminist critics. While all her writing is laced with moral passages, Brunton’s pace remains lively with a tone that edges on satire.

A clergyman’s wife, Brunton used fiction to assemble cautionary tales. In Self Control she focuses on Laura Montreville, a Scottish innocent who throughout the lengthy novel must resist seduction. The reader learns from the first page that Laura will meet the challenge when the narrative notes that she possesses “an active mind, a strong sense of duty, and the habit of meeting and of overcoming adverse circumstances.” That she will be victorious is of little doubt, despite the many pages of conflict ahead of her. They began with her contentious mother, who “had no principles and her heart was a mere ‘pulsation on the left side.’” However, Laura’s father, Captain Montreville, adores her.

When Laura is 17 her mother dies, and romance becomes important, entering her life in the form of the dastardly Colonel Hargrave, later described as having been “the spoiled child of a weak mother.” He holds little interest for Laura, who has fantasized about the perfect man, next to whom Hargrave pales. To escape Hargrave, she moves in with her friends the Douglases, in their country cottage. Her father eventually joins her, and they relocate to England as she continues to hope for her hero. In an amusing conversation, a friend asks Laura whether she might like a lover like Tom Jones, title character of Henry Fielding’s novel. Laura makes clear her opinion by saying, “I could not admire in a lover qualities which would be odious in a husband,” declaring that the public tolerates Tom only because he compares so positively with the novel’s horrid antagonist Blifil. Laura declares that her favored heroes are from works by Jane Porter, allowing Brunton to emphasize female writers and the importance of creativity to women, also evident in Laura’s painting.

When Montreville falls ill, Laura must sell some jewelry to help support herself and her father and accidentally encounters Hargrave, who is overjoyed to have found her following a three-month search. Unfortunately, the toll of her recent concerns overcomes her and she faints, caught up by Hargrave, who feels she has especially chosen him to support her. As Hargrave renews his acquaintance with the ill Montreville, he convinces the older man that his union with Laura would be in her best interest. Laura grows wan and pale, as a good romance heroine should, bravely attempting to hold up under the pressure to marry a man she does not love. Her continued pursuit of her art emphasizes the value of the release of passion such creation involves.

The novel presents an excellent example of the overblown language of the period and the popular romance novel when Laura protests her father’s attempts to persuade her to accept Hargrave’s offer: “How can a father urge his child to join to pollution this temple, (and she laid her hand emphatically on her breast) which my great master has offered to hallow as his own abode? No! The express command of heaven forbids the sacrilege.” Following her father’s death, Laura falls on predictable hard times, yet manages to escape Hargrave, her virtue and stamina rewarded by an eventual loving union with the virtuous Montague de Courcy.

While many early critics stressed Laura’s more obvious characteristics (her religious piety, moral superiority to many around her, natural sense of self-worth and dignity, modesty and passivity), later feminist critics noted that through Laura’s actions, Brunton clearly supports a woman’s right to creative work and to the income made possible by that work. And while Laura fantasizes about a certain man, she never waits passively to be rescued by one. Instead, she is an active heroine who disengages herself from threatening situations. Brunton’s work may hold little aesthetic appeal for readers centuries after its writing, but it remains of great interest to those seeking to understand the development of women’s writing, and as an example of work by an ordinary woman of a middle class that would soon be heard in its demand for social reform.

Bibliography

Maitland, Sara. Introduction to Self Control: A Novel, by Mary Brunton. New York: Pandora, 1986, ix–xi.

Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora, 1988.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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