Manipulating Through Poems: Composition, Emotions, and Agency in Amelia Opie’s The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden

ABSTRACT

Amelia Opie’s novels have typically been received as following the structure of the fallen-woman plot. This article reveals how Opie’s late understudied novel The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden (1821) forms a radical departure from this genre as the heroine uses her skill in writing and poetry composition to orchestrate for another character to die in her place. Using recent approaches in cognitive narratology, in particular the theory of predictive processing, I analyse how Portia utilises composition to manipulate emotions and genre expectations, and thus attain agency over plot events. This new cognitive account of composition’s representation demonstrates how the novel’s original poems model a method for constructing decisions that depart patriarchal scripted narratives. The cognitive approach to composition reveals how the novel’s radical politics lie, not in offering specific political values, but in demonstrating how the reader can use composition to interrogate gendered ideologies that are represented as moral behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Amelia Opie
• poetry composition
• emotions
• agency
• cognitive narratology
• fallen woman

In Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) a memorable scene occurs at the end of the novel when the fallen heroine states that were the outcome of her story up to her, she would choose to die: “Believe me, that were it possible for me to choose between life and death, for my child’s sake, the choice would be the latter”.¹ Popular in the early nineteenth century, Opie’s novels were, typically, moral tales in which the heroine’s death is an inevitable plot outcome that punishes her moral transgression.² These morals usually concern women’s transgression of conservative sexual values, but were also connected with Opie’s former radical social network. Opie had been close to Godwin’s social circle in the 1790s, and Adeline Mowbray has been traditionally read as a disavowal of her former politics.³ The novel re-works her former friend Wollstonecraft’s thinly-veiled biography into a moral tale.⁴ In its ending, the direction of this moral-tale plot is shown as a deliberately affective choice the author makes, so that the reader’s emotive involvement returns to prioritising the extraction of a moral.⁵ With a heroine who similarly proclaims in the final pages that she must die for her sins, The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden (1821) appears to reproduce the values and plot of Opie’s earlier novel. However, this anticipated plot outcome does not actually happen. In a surprising reversal of the moral tale, and the lack of agency typically attributed to the fallen-woman-tale heroine, in the final sentence Portia resumes the narration to reveal she has suddenly recovered and indeed married: “I can write no more now. I am just returned from the altar. Yes, I can now subscribe myself the happy PORTIA”.⁶ Not only had Portia earlier composed poetry to convince her future husband’s wife Lady Susan to adopt the self-destructive role of the fallen woman, her skill in composition is evident in her ability to convince herself she does not deserve such punishment. This article draws on the cognitive theory of predictive processing to provide a new reading that describes how the heroine uses composition as a tool to imagine radical choices for her own behaviour and thus re-write her role in the fallen-woman tale.

What little criticism there is of this novel attributes the surprising shifts in the plot to Opie’s political ambivalence. Roxanne Eberle interprets the novel as vacillating between the argument that women’s education is in need of reform, and a reinforcement of the social requirement for conformity to feminine behaviour – especially since in this reading, the only radical departure presented in the novel is emotional and sexual disorder, which the heroine ultimately repents.⁷ Accounting for the distinctive anonymous publication of The Only Child, published shortly between novels under Opie’s own name, Eberle speculates that her views fluctuated over the morality of public authorship as she steadily changed towards disavowing fiction altogether.⁸ This continues a traditional biographical approach which views Opie’s public profile as becoming progressively reactionary.⁹ What this approach does not account for is the agency the heroine attains through her poetic work. Portia’s emotional compositions enable her to marry Bethune, which she wants since the start of the novel, and her seeming errors inadvertently (or so she claims) prompt his wife to destruction. Rather than evaluating Opie’s novel as a compilation of extractable emotions, genres, and the author’s own political values, the present article takes a narrative reading of these effects as deliberate turns in the plot – that are revealed to be structures constructed by the fictional heroine. Using this framework, it becomes clear that in The Only Child the alternative to social conformity is not rebellious emotion that signifies a momentary loss of control. Rather than representing a reactionary view of women’s education, the heroine’s composition of poems and emotions allows her to construct plot paths far beyond the scope of a heroine in moralising women’s fiction.

Instead of writing to reflect upon her feelings retrospectively, Portia’s emotions only fully make sense when we approach them as a strategy she uses to justify her future behaviour. However, it is not commonplace in literary criticism to describe emotions as decisions. Across psychology and philosophy of mind, the theory of predictive processing demonstrates how minds and bodies are primarily trying to work out what is most likely to happen next.¹⁰ The theory can describe how feelings alter plot events, since notions such as memory and emotion (which we commonly consider to be passive) are revealed in predictive processing to be a means of influencing events before they have happened. Within psychology, Lisa Feldman Barrett has put forward the theory of constructed emotion. As Barrett’s theory proposes, “emotion concepts are goal-based concepts”, and language in particular creates “concepts” we can choose between to fine-tune our understanding of the response we feel.¹¹ For instance between “anger”, “rage” and “discontent”, we have a range of options to both describe and direct our comprehension of the same feeling.¹² The emotion is “goal-based” because we learn how these different categories have implications on outcomes; an emotional response to being pushed over, for example, might be anger or sadness depending on what we have learnt will be the consequence of this emotion in a given situation. Barrett’s argument that language is a key tool in choosing between eventualities provides a new perspective on the agency afforded to Opie’s heroine.

Barrett focuses on how individual words define emotions, and does not consider narrative. However, Portia’s manipulations draw a link between her surprising internal feelings, and generic literary expectations. Within cognitive narratology, Karin Kukkonen theorises how predictive processing may work with the predictions a reader of a novel makes. Embodied, emotive moments do not form a descriptive background to the plot, but instead shape how the reader is carried through and alters their expectations.¹³ A novel’s reader is rarely a “detective” who must consciously piece together clues of what is most likely to happen.¹⁴ Rather, the reader is led (usually unconsciously) through “emotional investments” of what they think should or will happen in the plot. Such narrative design simulates a feeling of agency for the reader. When a prediction is confirmed in the plot, there is “a feeling of mastery and control over the complex configurations of the events”.¹⁵ As I make the case, another concept of agency is added when the protagonist within the novel has additional tools to precisely compose a feeling through which to respond to the plot situation.

My focus on the representation of composition provides a new perspective on Opie’s development of psychologically-complex Romantic narrators. While recent studies of Opie’s early poetry recognise the use of material, affective practices to propose radical social sympathies,¹⁶ poems within her moral tales have thus far been read as marking the limits of her political radicalism. In a significant account of Opie’s development of Romantic introspection, Shelley King argues that the representation of daily, poetic practices – familiar to middle-class female readers – form “natural contributions to the psychological realism” of her fictional heroines.¹⁷ Like several critics, King reads the poems as the opposite of agency: the fragmentation of protagonists’ thought, or even their “diseased mind”.¹⁸ There is much to be said for considering The Only Child as a novel that develops complex Romantic subjectivity, since, as the present article demonstrates, Portia’s first-person journal narrative reveals that her transgressions are far more serious than she acknowledges. However, such approaches to Opie’s fiction take for granted that these poems evoke passive, unconscious mental processes.¹⁹ My framing of composition as the material remaking of thought recognises that Portia consciously weaponizes the Romantic elevation of unfiltered, original feeling. In particular, she utilises the emotional principle established in Romantic lyrics – that they must be authentically felt and personal – to create a feedback loop by which her idiosyncratic actions are justified by recognising inner, unexpected emotional responses.

Opie’s Romantic interest in the psychology of narration is political: characters who do not compose cannot tell the difference between their own decisions, gendered social expectations, and pure fiction. My account places Opie’s development of psychologically-complex narrators in parallel with canonical Romantic novels by marginalised authors, such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In parallel with Opie, Hogg’s mixing of identities represents the Romantic ideology of original, spontaneous thought as a dysfunctional model of mind that ignores the sociable, contagious nature of feeling and cognition.²⁰ While Hogg’s novel reveals this ideology as incoherent beyond its enforcement of hierarchy,²¹ Opie’s The Only Child presents the reader with a compositional toolkit to flip the gendered script: the heroine utilises the Romantic prioritisation of inspired, uncontrolled feeling to construct new choices for her own decisions in the plot.

Emotions and Literary Genres as Cognitive Tools

The first-person journal form of The Only Child ostensibly suggests that Portia uses her writing for retrospective reflection. This impression is shown to be heightened by the fictional heroine herself, as she intermittently sends parts of the journal for moral feedback to her former governess-turned-nun. However, the plot reveals that Portia’s emotions are orientated towards her manipulations of future plot possibilities. Portia frequently identifies with the emotions of literary characters in vastly different plot situations from her own, that in turn offer her new templates for her behaviour in the plot. Early in the novel, the heroine’s love interest Bethune marries Lady Susan after Portia wrongly assumes he was in love with herself. An ordinary heroine might take this as a lesson in her misjudgement that he was not her ideal potential husband – it is after all an early marginal plot moment – and move on. Instead, Portia realises her strong feeling that she must claim revenge on Bethune. Portia describes that she becomes aware of her true feelings by observing her emotional transformation. Yet, at the same time, the interior emotions she records in her journal are clearly informed by external literary genres:

A change, however, perhaps I may call it a morbid change, now took place in my feelings towards Bethune: I felt as if he really was become an object of abhorrence to me; a deep sense of injury rankled at my heart, and I experienced a desire of revenge! a feeling till now a stranger to my nature. What says the play: —

Earth has no rage like love to hatred turned,

And hell no fury like a woman scorned! (151–52)

Portia treats her emotions as observable and interpretable, as she systematically lists her unfolding feelings as a “change”, “perhaps … a morbid change”. She records that her “desire for revenge” is not initially informed by literary possibilities, but is a conclusion formed from intensely scrutinising her evolving responses. Yet, as Portia recounts how she “experienced” this “desire for revenge”, she grafts together an emotional reaction and a literary genre. This alerts us to how her desire is not just a feeling. Since the feeling and intention to revenge are not motivated elsewhere in the narrative, we are made to think in terms of this literary genre, and the plot as a whole, to understand what this feeling enables her to do. The quotation is from Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, and using it, Portia efficiently labels her emotion with the experience – and plot role – of a revenge hero. The quotation is a variation of Congreve’s “Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, / No hell a fury like to woman scorn’d”. Portia’s misquotation of Congreve is seen in multiple contemporaneous texts from different genres,²² which suggests it is used here to indicate a generic revenging role in a tragedy – one that allows a female character to behave very differently from a typical moral-tale heroine. I thus read it as a generic extract which Portia uses to concisely provide herself with actions she can follow rather than a reference to a more specific plot.

Emotions such as “rage” are often perceived as responses that are hard-wired and outside of our control, yet in a predictive processing framework, they can be understood as choices that we (usually unconsciously) make. Predictive processing theory provides a framework for considering how emotion concepts are built on our estimates of how they will affect future events.²³ Although Barrett focuses on words rather than narratives, literary genres can also function as tools that create templates for feelings and behaviour. In Opie’s novel, the generic term “revenge tragedy” summarises a prediction categorising a feeling in the same way as Barrett’s emotion concept. In Kukkonen’s application of the “theory of constructed emotion” to narrative theory, literary texts and genres work as tools by which a character who reads within the novel can “attempt to short-circuit the probability design” of the novel; that is, this character can make a prediction and summarise how the text will work, and then has the agency to potentially act by this determination.²⁴ A character who can compose has an additional strategy to attain agency. When Portia writes that she experiences a feeling of revenge, she chooses to implement an emotion into her experience through her writing. The expected response of a moral heroine would consign Portia to at least give up trying to marry Bethune (as he is already married). The adoption of the revenge hero role, by stark contrast, allows her in the larger frame of the plot to stalk Bethune, rather than give up on her choice of narrative. Portia’s ability to compose emotions through writing, and then to integrate them into the plot, gives her the ability to change the course of events because she can choose templates for her experience that depart radically from what a typical heroine should experience and how they should behave.

The Only Child presents a disturbing entanglement of personal feelings, gendered ideologies, and learned narratives for behaviour, as the heroine adopts fictional clichéd feelings with ease. This does not, however, represent a failure or distortion in her cognition. Portia is educated in a broad range of genres and narratives that are listed early in her narration – including Greek epigrams, essays on free will, Latin plays, and classical poetry.²⁵ Her ability to experimentally deploy fictional templates for emotions and behaviour into her feelings demonstrates a method for interrogating the relationship between emotions – experienced as uncontrollable, personal responses – and gendered social scripts. Composition thus provides Portia with a bulwark against the unwitting absorption of gendered templates for classifying her embodied experiences.

Composing Plots through Poetry

As Portia justifies her idiosyncratic decisions through observing her emotions, it is worth considering how the heroine also uses a different strategy. Opie’s fiction has frequently been assessed as combining two genres generally considered to be opposites: the moral tale, and the emergence of psychological complexity in Romantic prose. Gary Kelly has argued “a subtle grasp of psychological realism” manifests as “touches [that] are buried in her collection of tales”.²⁶ In this approach, moments of Romantic psychological complexity appear as discrete aberrations inserted into the template of the didactic tale. Shelley King complicates the dichotomy between psychological realism and social practices in Opie’s plots and characterisation, reframing poetry composed by Opie’s heroines as “lyric utterance [that] transcends the solipsism of its usual associations with purely subjective experience”.²⁷ What is missing from accounts that suggest Opie used sentiments to describe psychological realism for its own sake is an explanation of how the heroine’s strong emotions contribute to a feedback loop that justifies her plot actions: Portia “feels” strongly that she must get revenge on another character without much justification. The role of emotions in this plot does not fit the critical narrative that such feelings only describe a character’s interiority; they intervene in plot development. Rather than emotions being read as expressions – which has led to readings of Opie’s novels as being characterised by containing emotive incidents separate from the plot’s events – another lens is to read the heroine’s approach to emotions as a tool. This account of predictive processing can now be used to reassess how emotions work as tools, and thereby connect the heroine’s recurring poetic, emotive meditations with her agency in creating changes to expected plot structures. To return to Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, emotions are social, as you use them to “invent part of your world, in a collective with other brains”.²⁸ Portia’s writing deliberately constructs this social element of the self.

In The Only Child, the heroine uses Romanticism to reshape the relationship between the social world and her personal responses: the more Portia departs from a socially conventional emotion, the more she can represent her choice as idiosyncratic and therefore justified. My theory of composition’s representation shifts the approach to Romanticism from a genre representing inward reflection – that in effect detaches the heroine from social realities – to a method of re-constructing the perception of the interior self and its relation to social dynamics. Unlike our heroine, who uses literary genres as prisms through which to revise her thinking, other characters do not practice the same compositional method of choosing how they separate their feelings from fictional and social templates for their behaviour. While the novel represents a social world in which shared, generic fictions permeate personal feelings and decisions with disturbing ease, the heroine can also weaponize Romantic poetics to change the way she perceives the boundaries between her own thoughts and those of others. In effect, the protagonist composer can choose and re-collage at will which feelings – revealed to be fictional and social instructions for behaviour – she allows “in”. The exploration in this novel of permeable, and composable, selfhood not only models a political tool for disrupting the transfer of gendered narratives into personal feelings and behaviour. It also presents a method for orchestrating new social roles to remake such generic scripts.

Portia exploits Susan and Annally’s tendency to confuse personal feelings with generic plots. In the centre of the novel, Portia hands over her original poems to a besotted new suitor, Lord Annally. What might raise suspicions of Portia’s manipulative antics to the reader is that, just before, he appears to adopt the feelings and motivations of the revenge hero, that the heroine had earlier composed for herself. Portia later records how Annally reveals his plan to repurpose love poems she had written earlier in her love of Bethune, in order to flirt with Bethune’s new wife Lady Susan. At the surface, Annally’s intention is to impress Portia and prove his own love by punishing Bethune for the disappointment he had caused Portia at the start of the novel. Yet, there are darker orchestrations in Portia’s composed poems than Annally realises. Although Portia represents this plot as entirely Annally’s, her narration provides clues that suggest she has extensively manipulated Annally’s plan and that she foresees how the plot will resolve in a fallen-woman tale. She describes how she shows Annally an early letter in which Bethune had revealed he would marry Susan instead of Portia. Annally’s outraged response of explaining he has decided to create social ballroom intrigue by flirting with Susan, is recounted by Portia as a revenge hero’s decision:

“Oh! yes; I must — I must. It gives such a zest of ingenious malice to the transaction, to know that I am converting the tender effusions of your wounded spirit and breaking heart; wounded and breaking from his treachery; into the means of making him feel some of the torments he inflicted on you, Portia!” he added, grasping my arm, while an almost awful fire flashed from his eyes; … . (211; original italics)

Her earlier feeling of revenge appears now in Annally, with no reasonable explanation from the narrative or plot events to show how he has decided on this precise role or even to justify his extreme anger. Portia represents this as her witnessing of Annally’s manic decision-making. However, the phrase “an almost awful fire flashed from his eyes” suggests a measured insertion of a generic, literary example describing a revenge hero. Such overtly constructed genre-defined moments alert the reader to there being something wrong with her narration: flirting to make Bethune jealous and embarrass him in a ball does not constitute blood-thirsty revenge. This unexplained transference of the role of revenge hero from herself to Annally indicates that Portia is likely to have omitted the extent of her manipulations of Annally from her narrative. Moreover, her agency in writing here is not only a matter of retrospective interpretation and justification. Portia’s poetry composition in this section of the plot gives the reader clues that she uses writing to immediately convince other characters, through her use of genres they are familiar with, to adopt roles that are not their own.

Portia is described early in the novel as “a Sappho in poetry” (9). However, this scene with Annally is the only point in the novel when her original poems are presented to the reader, which might alert them to their centrality to the plot. If readers recognise that Portia is making suggestions to Annally that are not explicitly stated, Portia’s claim that these poems had been written at the start of the novel inspired by her former love of Bethune could be questioned. Portia hands over the final of three poems, a lyric entitled “Song”, with uncanny speed to Annally when he decides he needs one more poem to flirt with Susan: “‘But a truce with these dismals, and write me another song for the fellow’s wife.’ ‘Will this do?’ said I, and I gave him the following” (214). Although Portia’s narration insists this is Annally’s idea, and that Annally is repurposing her old poems despite her own reluctance, the speed of her response suggests that she has expected and even pre-conceived this exchange. The theme of destruction, which has just before been voiced by Annally as he extemporised over imagined intents, is repeated in this final poem’s middle stanza, and raises the possibility that this poem was written by Portia as Annally was speaking:

Thou think’st those eyes and lips of love

Can only wake the soul to joy,

But that deluding thought reprove—

They first delight, and then destroy. (215, lines 5–8)

The verse attests to the ease with which one strong emotion can be categorised as another one. The rhyme of “wake the soul to joy” with “first delight, and then destroy” suggests a feeling of love is translated into not only hate but one connected to destruction without justification. This feeling is not what we expect of wooing love lyrics. The middle stanza could be therefore a re-working of Annally’s extemporising of his cold destructive intent. Alternatively, even if the poem had been written prior to Annally’s rant, it might suggest Portia had foreseen or “planted” Annally’s seemingly extemporised, emotional realisations. Portia becomes an observer of the extent to which emotions, provoked by feelings presumed to be uncontrolled, internal revelations, are inherently part of generic narratives, both literary and social. Annally’s emotions are orchestrated by Portia’s pitiful poems into a very specific generic role of the revenge hero, but furthermore he becomes a participant in a plot to destroy a woman’s reputation, which has a social narrative beyond the artificiality and literariness of the tragic revenge hero. The characters attach emotions to taking plot actions that do not follow as generically consistent responses to the situation. Readers can see the incongruence, even if Annally cannot.

Portia exploits the Romantic model that emotions and decisions are all the more valuable when they are independently reached, to act as a puppeteer of Annally’s thoughts. The first poem that Portia gives him to pass on to Susan is inconsistent with the extreme anger and malicious plots expressed by Annally, even though he claims this poem expresses his emotions. Annally claims that “Stanzas of Sorrow” is intended to be “descriptive of his feelings towards” Susan, so readers might expect a love lyric (208). However, the poem is filled with hopelessness and stasis, as it is structured by bleak stanza endings such as “And darken’d seems the noon-day light, / And strangely still the restless sea”, and “The languid sheep no longer play, / The streams no longer seem to flow” (209, lines 3–4, 11–12; original italics). This melancholy and rigid predictable language does not match the supposed love he means to convey. As with all three poems included in full in the novel, and that Annally will hand over to Susan (seemingly at Portia’s prompting), this lyric ends on an insistence that the speaker will die from their feelings: “But when shall I that day behold / When I shall fill my peaceful grave?” (209, lines 23–24). The insertion of this narrative ending into the poem does not appear suspicious at first because it is a hallmark of a Werther-esque love sonnet, so it appears a typical vehicle to expressing emotion. The poem’s speaker describes that amidst the melancholy stasis of their surroundings, it is only their own thoughts that independently develop, “No—nought on earth is chang’d—but me” (209, line 16). The insistence on the unique perspective of this speaker – as it is only they who realise their own situation compared with their unthinking surroundings – implies that the poem primes its readers to believe they have uniquely worked out this position for themselves. The poems, although they are presented as love lyrics, are connected with Lady Susan’s later decision to die for love and the fallen-woman plot that will ensue. Portia thus uses the Romantic-stance feedback loop – that spontaneous, unique feelings evidenced as being thus by social stigma, in turn justify valuable idiosyncratic thought – in order to control characters who read her verse. It is the logic in the poem, namely, that characters work out their own thoughts by closely observing and realising their isolated emotions, that implicitly enables Portia to make Annally and Susan believe they have “felt” their decisions for themselves after reading the poems.

Portia’s poems provide clues as to how she is able to compose other characters’ emotions and reasoning, and this can help account for the marked discrepancies in her prose narrative. The heroine is at pains to insist that her conversations with Annally about the poems are, in fact, irrelevant to the plot. She dismisses the discussion as a digression: “But how strangely I have digressed; I have stopt [sic] in my narration of the dinner-party at my home, to give you the songs which I have mentioned before, and the conversation to which they gave birth” (216). By representing her poems as a supposed digression between descriptions of returned social visits that she casts as the main events, this heroine shapes the plot by deciding what counts as a main incident. After all, plotting seduction is much less survivable for a heroine in a moral tale than naively writing love letters in a digression.

The heroine also shapes how other characters conceive of events. Portia’s short interjections prompt Annally to construct a narrative which fills blatant gaps in his reasoning of how he has ended up with thoughts not applicable to his experience. When he states that he will not stop until “both you and I are revenged”, Portia probes his decision to get revenge, “‘But how has he injured you, Annally?’” – a question the reader might well be asking (212; original italics). This provokes Annally to immediately extemporise an explanation which readers know is not true. He explains Bethune had meant to cause Portia harm “with cold, selfish calculation”, and with “cold-blooded caution” Bethune had not cared that Portia “hurried on to destruction!” (213–14; original italics). But we know from early in the novel that the fairly thoughtless Bethune had gone along with an engagement because Portia had assumed it was happening and her father expected it. There is no evidence in the narrative so far that he had any plans to destroy her. Annally fills in explanations for his stance as a revenge hero with little prompting, by applying a generic literary narrative that Portia is a helpless victim who had been led to destruction. He is represented as adopting, with disturbing fluency, a literary narrative that fits his emotion but does not fit actual events. The heroine is thus shown to probe the extent to which emotions can be easily connected with explanations through generic narratives – not just literary ones.

By stark contrast to the characters she manipulates, Portia can shape her own emotions to opt out of plot roles she does not want. When Annally remarks on how effective it is to use a woman’s help “‘in charming a woman’”, Portia is completely puzzled by his suggestion that she has anything to do with his plans. She replies “‘And am I assisting you to charm Bethune’s wife?’” He rhetorically asks her to consider this for a moment, “What do you think of the matter, sweet coz?” (215). But after consideration, her response is uniquely unperceptive, “I did not, could not answer I was doing it” (215; original italics). Her shift from “did not” to “could not” represents her as observing of herself that she is genuinely unable to comprehend her part in the events she has blatantly participated in. The shift from “did” to “could”, moreover, suggests Portia moves from trying to conceptualise this, to trying to feel it. She is not represented as consciously choosing to ignore it, or hide her part in the plot. It is worth focusing on this moment, as with predictive processing we can discover a more nuanced interpretation than reading Portia as a representation of a distorted thought process, or as an unreliable narrator. Rather than acting by conscious performance or unconscious responses as separate influences, Portia is shown to construct her emotional, instinctive experience in tandem with how it repositions the way she encounters and shapes others. Here we may uncover Opie’s challenge to the ideology of Romantic interiority. While this ideology determines that other characters haplessly embody gendered emotions they believe to be “authentic” – resulting in farcical reenactments of tired social scripts – the heroine’s compositions challenge her to invert her assumptions of the interior “self”. This process, modelled to the reader, enables her to fundamentally remake gendered framings of experience.

Re-Writing the Fallen-Woman Plot

The heroine’s ability to compose emotions provides her with the tools to re-script her plot role in gendered, destructive narratives of punishment – such as popularised by Opie’s moral tales. There is compelling, previously unstudied archival evidence that Opie assumed readers would relate The Only Child to her then best-known novel The Father and Daughter because of the scene in which Lady Susan meets her fallen-woman death.²⁹ In a letter she sent to Rev. William Harness, Opie discussed whether the blatant similarities in the plots of The Only Child and The Father and Daughter might result in charges of plagiarism:

In my new tale ‘The Only Child,’ I fear I shall remind persons of the forest scene in [th]e ‘Father and Daughter’; but, as no one has remarked this to me, I conclude that I alone see the likeness. I mean when Susan is found mad not in ‘white satin,’ but in snow.³⁰

The “snow” refers to the then famed dramatic scene in The Father and Daughter. It is implied in the letter that there has been a dispute with her publisher Ebers over the possibility that elements from the plot might be charged for plagiarism, presumably by Longman and Rees, the publisher of The Father and the Daughter, elaborating

I do so long to see it in print! How very false is, often, [th]e charge of plagiarism. I read in novels, frequently, ideas + plans + so on, which, if not read after I had written, I should think I had, unconsciously, borrowed from.³¹

Opie suggests that referring to other texts is natural, while it appears this creates a problem for her publisher. Opie’s evident keenness to publish, despite these problems with accusations of plagiarism, contradicts critical views that her interest in fiction was declining, and suggests that it is possible Opie intended The Only Child – although published anonymously – to counterpoint better-known works published under her own name.

Lady Susan adopts the fallen-woman role in The Only Child although it does not follow from her previous behaviour or plot role. Susan’s unthinking assumption of this role, compared with Portia’s precise, piecemeal deployment of generic feelings and narratives, provides a striking contrast that challenges the view that Opie’s political radicalism had declined by this late novel. Through the heroine’s ability to deploy feelings and narrative possibilities which show up gendered roles in moral tales as purposelessly destructive, Opie equips the novel’s reader with tools to consider the misuses of such narratives. The plot reveals that the second poem Portia composes resembles Susan’s fall and demise in disconcerting detail. On a first reading, without knowing the coming events, we can note that the poem provides clues of Portia’s ulterior motives. There are sudden shifts in the poem from blaming a betraying lover to anticipating the outcome of death. The first two stanzas describe a seduction and betrayal in conventional lyrical language, as the poem begins “And could that smile of love deceive? / And could those soothing words betray?” (210, lines 1–2). Continuing the pattern of Portia’s narrative grafting of disparate emotions and reasoning, there is then a shift from the first-person rhetorical musing questions of the first two stanzas, to a very specific visual image in the final stanza:

Thus, while o’er frozen plains of snow,

The wanderer goes, with fainting breath,

Sleep comes, and seems to sooth his woe,

But, ah! that soothing sleep is—death! (210, lines 9–12)

While “thus” in the final stanza might be expected to continue into an elaboration of the poetic speaker’s lyrical feeling, the shift to a precise, third-person visual description could strike one as a consciously selected change, rather than the inevitable lyric expression it anticipates. Although the poems make only fragmentary suggestions of the fallen-woman narrative, the fictional reader and victim of Portia’s plot, Susan, will, like Annally, fill in this implied narrative and adopt the generic character’s resolution as her own. It emerges soon after in the novel that Susan adopts the logic of this lyric – that she is solitary and heart-broken and therefore will die – as her own intention. The “frozen plains” and “the wanderer” will be realised when Portia finally comes across Susan wandering close to death in a winter landscape after being abandoned by Annally.

By relating the poems to narratives in the plot, we can see that Portia is represented as foreseeing that her orchestrations will likely lead to the deathly seduction narrative for Lady Susan. The words of Portia’s poems, which insist that a hopeless lover should go and die, end up being spoken by Susan herself. Annally reports in letters to Portia that Susan had run away from her husband Bethune to him, but he turned her away. It is at this point that he reports what Susan, “in a deep and desperate tone” told him she has resolved to do: “I will go if you insist on it—but it will be to go and die there!” (242; original italics). What makes this peculiarly disturbing is that, although Susan implicitly believes this is her own decision made in the moment, the narrative and language she uses to justify her choice are from the poems Portia had sent to her. It is Susan who decides to return to her parents and die in repentant agony. Her statement that she will go home to die is precisely what the character of the fallen woman would do. Yet, as with Annally’s revenge hero role, there is an unexplained incoherence between Susan’s experience, and the plot role she adopts. Although the love poems cause Susan to abandon her new husband for Annally who she believes wrote them for her, Annally does not respond to the sexual advance and urges her to leave. Her status as a “fallen woman” is thus ambivalent. However, Susan adopts the role of the fallen heroine of a moral tale fully, through her declaration and subsequent actions. It appears testament to Portia’s skilful deployment of fictional plots – with which characters are more familiar in this novel than their rational judgment – that she can orchestrate their adoption of roles with the slightest prompts of emotions and narratives.

Portia, by contrast, chooses not to feel things. On her carriage ride before she meets the fallen Susan supposedly by chance, Portia is warned “the snow is so deep, almost untracked in those parts” – indeed, this is repeated twice – before she presses the servants to go ahead regardless (249). The snowy landscape recalls the language of the last poem that Portia had written for Annally to give Susan, in which, “o’er frozen plains of snow, / The wanderer goes, with fainting breath” (210, lines 9–10). This also references the striking scene in The Father and Daughter in which the fallen heroine, Agnes, finds her father while returning home from her seducer with her illegitimate child.³² In The Father and Daughter, this moment is a step towards the heroine’s acknowledgement of the destruction that her “immoral” behaviour has caused: Agnes’s father has become mad as a result of her leaving home with her seducer. While she does not at first recognise him, Agnes realises “in agony too great for utterance” the consequences of her actions.³³ In the parallel moment in Opie’s later novel, Portia does not recognise any part in her destruction of the wandering victim.

Lady Susan’s death, although the main plot event, is ultimately represented by Portia as a minor incident and a digression from Portia’s journey of moral growth. Portia’s eventual moral realisation from Annally’s letters describing Susan’s illness results in an emotive resolution, but one irrelevant to the situation, as she concludes from her emotional turmoil that to resolve it, she must visit her neglected sister: “At last I could bear it no longer … I resolved to put my long-formed but troubled plan, of visiting my sister, into execution” (246–47). This is clearly not the expected resolution to be drawn from Annally’s letters. The moral pangs, however, represent Portia as structurally on track to growing a conscience. All too conveniently, she does not associate the emotion with her role in Susan’s destruction fully until after she receives confirmation that Susan is dead (279, 307). Her moral conclusion comes as she recovers; she relates that it was “some time before I recovered any thing [sic] like composure, … and I secretly resolved that if I could prevail on Fanny to accompany me back, we would never, if I could prevent it, be parted again” (259). In so doing, Portia frames Susan’s death as a minor pitiable incident which inspires her to behave better towards her sister: she can develop morally, without acknowledging a sin that is not survivable in a fallen-woman tale.

On her own death bed (shortly before her miraculous recovery and marriage to Susan’s widower), Portia makes further alterations to the genre predictions of the fallen-woman-tale plot. She takes a moment amidst her realisation of her errors, when she clarifies to her fictional moral reader Constance that she definitely did not know that her poetic games would cause death. After Portia realises the necessity of confessing her authorship of the flirtatious letters to Bethune, she elaborates that this will involve telling “him that I assisted Annally, by the exertion of my talents … and that though I did not foresee the exact consequences, I was not really sorry when I heard she had eloped” (314). Seen within the pattern of the heroine’s shaping of emotions and generic likelihoods, her insistence on the limitations of her predictions and the odd specificity that she “did not foresee the exact consequences”, is deliberately questionable. It sets the limits of culpability in the plot: the orchestration of adultery is not survivable in the moral tale, but her realisation of minor missteps provides the possibility that her moral growth should be rewarded.

Conclusion

A cognitive account of composition reveals that Romanticism in The Only Child has a narrative function in overhauling embodied predictions and models of mind that reinforce gendered ideologies of “natural” behaviour. We may now suggest that the anonymous publication of this novel can be accounted for, not by Opie’s move towards conservatism, but for its representation of literary and conceptual tools that interrogate emotions, narratives and moral values readers may assume will follow in restrictive and punishing plots such as the fallen-woman tale. This makes the case for a wider reassessment of early Romantic novels overlooked for their refusal to fit critically established models of Romantic authenticity, and for disorientating moves in the plot: when composed by protagonists, such moves can prompt the reader to reconfigure both what is “interior” to the self and what responses are beyond the control of the individual. This article thus demonstrates a theoretical framework for uncovering the radicalism of mixed-genre women’s Romantic novels such as Opie’s, not for specific feminist values, but in modelling a method to invert passive notions of emotion and the self, so that narrative structures puppeteering women’s behaviour can be reconceptualised as malleable fictions to be rescripted.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Charles Carter (Assistant Curator) and Dr Elizabeth Denlinger (Curator), at The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Their support during my research stay made it a crucial stage for the research developed in this article. I would also like to thank the University of Oslo for the Humanities Faculty Long-Stay Trip Research Funding which made the archival trip possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yasemin Hacioglu

Yasemin Hacioglu is an Associate Professor in English Literature, Culture and Didactics at Volda University College, Norway. Her PhD thesis, “Thinking through Poems: Composition and Decision-Making in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Novels”, was fully funded by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo, and successfully defended in September 2021. This project involved participating in LCE (Literature, Cognition and Emotions), an interdisciplinary research initiative between literature, psychology and neuroscience.

Notes

1 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, or, the Mother and Daughter, ed. Anne McWhir (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2010), p. 257.

2 For arguments that Opie’s novels reinforce conservative values through plot endings, Eleanor Ty, Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 161; Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 52; Nowell Marshall, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), pp. 149, 155; Andrew McInnes, Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 75.

3 Contemporary reviews make pointed allusions to Opie’s change in politics, for example, “Adeline … becomes tinctured with the principles of modern philosophy, principles which seem to be rapidly sinking to the oblivion they so well deserve”, Anon, “Adeline Mowbray; The Mother and Daughter; A Tale in Three Volumes. By Mrs. Opie. 12mo. 13s. 6d”, The Lady’s Monthly Museum, 15 (1805): 198. For how reviewers simplified Adeline Mowbray as “an anti-Jacobin novel”, Christine M. Cooper, “Reading Otherwise: The Abortive Politics of Adeline Mowbray, or the Mother and the Daughter”, European Romantic Review, 12.1 (2001), pp. 2–5, 27–28. For Opie’s changing connection with Wollstonecraft, Claire Sheridan, “Being Last: Widowhood and Outliving the Radical Coteries of the 1790s”, European Romantic Review, 22.2 (2011): 173–86.

4 Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 118, 121; Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. 235–26; M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 89.

5 On social and publication practices of extracting “sentimental vignettes” from Opie’s tales, Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-century Home (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 215.

6 Amelia Opie, The Only Child: or, Portia Bellenden: A Tale (London: J. Ebers, 1821), p. 326. Further citations to this work are given in the text.

7 Roxanne Eberle, introduction to The Only Child: or Portia Bellenden, by Amelia Opie, vol. 4 of Women and Romanticism, 1750–1850, ed. Roxanne Eberle (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. x–xi. The ambivalence of the ending is also noted in, Shelley King and John B. Pierce, The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 541 n204. For an alternative approach to Opie’s representation of women’s education, from reactionary politics to critiques of reading strategies, Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), pp. 88–89.

8 Eberle, introduction, p. ix.

9 Ibid., p. x. Eberle suggests ambiguous politics in Opie’s late fiction represents her astute navigations of the increasingly hostile climate towards feminism. The Only Child was published anonymously between two novels published under her own name, Tales of the Heart (1818) and Madeline (1822). For biographical narratives of Opie’s increasing conservatism, Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 13; Ann H. Jones, Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen’s Age (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 265. For an insightful counterargument to the notion that Opie gave up “fiction”, through a study of her Quaker faith, Isabelle Cosgrave, “‘White Lies’: Amelia Opie, Fiction, and the Quakers”, PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2014, pp. 227–77.

10 Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 106–07; Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (London: Macmillan, 2017), pp. 59–66.

11 Barrett, How Emotions are Made, p. 92.

12 Ibid., pp. 87, 98.

13 Ibid., pp. 19–21, 84–95.

14 Karin Kukkonen, Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 17.

15 Ibid., pp. 53–54.

16 For Opie’s subversions of “aristocratic privilege” through utilising “embodied experience” within album verses, Samantha Matthews, Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 80, 79. See also John Bugg, British Romanticism and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 19–25.

17 Shelley King, “‘To Delineate the Human Mind in its Endless Varieties’: Integral Lyric and Characterization in the Tales of Amelia Opie”, Eighteenth-century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), p. 65.

18 Ibid., p. 74. King here analyses “The Orphan” (1806), to exemplify her approach to original poems by Opie’s heroines. Only Eberle and Cosgrave have thus far studied The Only Child in detail. Both describe poems as vehicles that enable Susan’s seduction; however, these are associated with a loss of control. As a result, they read the novel as a more straight-forward redemption story. Cosgrave, “‘White Lies’”, pp. 220–21; Eberle, introduction, p. xi.

19 This follows the critical tradition of reading poems within Romantic-era women’s fiction as heroines’ uncontrolled expressions, reflecting male canonical Romantic poetics of figuring subjectivity as an Aeolian harp. See especially, Gillian Beer, “‘Our Unnatural No-voice’: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic”, The Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982), p. 151; Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 124–42; Mary Favret, “Telling Tales about Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel”, Studies in the Novel, 26.1/2 (1994), pp. 292–94; Ingrid Horrocks, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 118–25.

20 For important readings on Hogg’s destabilisation of the psychological and social categorisation of gendered authority and heteronormative sexuality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 97–106; George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 58–60.

21 Rather than claiming Opie and Hogg knew of or built upon each other’s work, I draw attention to how both novelists, marginalised by Quaker and labouring class positions respectively, create alternative models of mind to those promoted by establishment, formally radical poets such as Wordsworth. For a useful account of how Hogg’s aesthetic deconstructs Romantic “solitary inspiration”, Meiko O’Halloran, James Hogg and British Romanticism (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 179–80, 41, 37–38. See also Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 186, 191.

22 William Congreve, The Works of William Congreve, ed. D.F. McKenzie, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 60. For examples of this (mis)quotation, Edward Kimber, The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for P. Stevens, 1757), p. 229; Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1796), p. 365.

23 Barrett, How Emotions are Made, pp. 84–94.

24 Kukkonen, Probability Designs, pp. 112, 115.

25 For example, pp. 9, 15, 62, 42–43, 58, 309.

26 Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 84.

27 King, “‘To Delineate the Human Mind in its Endless Varieties’”, p. 69.

28 Barrett, How Emotions are Made, p. 110.

29 King and Pierce note there were at least 9 editions up to 1830, Shelley King and John B. Pierce, introduction to The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry, by Amelia Opie, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 11.

30 This letter is transcribed by Opie’s niece in, Cecilia Brightwell, Extra-illustrated Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown & Co., 1854), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library, Pforz BND-MSS+ (Opie), leaf 183. Brightwell signals it is a transcription, noting where the original manuscript is “(torn)”, leaf 187. Paula R. Feldman first evidenced Opie’s authorship of The Only Child using a manuscript letter in her private collection dated 1839, Paula R. Feldman, British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 527.

31 [Cecelia Brightwell’s transcription of] Amelia Opie to Rev. William Harness, 20 Oct 1820, Extra-illustrated Memorials of the Life, Pforzheimer Collection, leaf 183.

32 Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 135. This detail of “snow” appears late in the novel, as the repentant seducer Clifford imagines “the story that Agnes and her child had perished in the snow”.

33 Ibid., p. 93.