Review: The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve

Review: The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve

by Rich Horton

Clara Reeve (1729-1807) was one of the significant woman writers of the 18th Century, though she got a late start. She published a book of poems at the age of 40, then in 1772 The Phoenix, a translation, from the Latin, of John Barclay's 1621 romance Argenis. She kept writing to the end of her life -- several novels and some nonfiction, including Plans for Education, concerning education for women, and a major early study of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785). 

The Old English Baron is one of the most influential (if not necessarily one of the best) early works of Gothic fiction. It was first published in 1777 as The Champion of Virtue, then revised in 1780 as The Old English Baron. The author (originally anonymous, but with the revised version she began using her name on her books) wrote it as an explicit response to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the plot has strong points of similarity to that book. But Reeve's purpose, in part, was to model a more realistic mode of the Gothic -- both to reduce the supernatural elements to make them more believable, and to emphasize the moral message.

It's a short novel -- maybe 55,000 words -- and fairly simple in plot. Sir Philip Harclay returns from the wars (in Turkey, it seems), and after reestablishing his own household, goes off to visit is close friend Lord Lovel, with whom he had lost contact during his time overseas. As he comes close to the man's manor, he learns from a peasant that the old Lord is dead, and that the new Lord Walter Lovel has sold his castle to another man, the Baron Fitz-Owen. Upon finally reaching the castle, he meets the Baron and his sons and their friend, including a young peasant named Edmund who has been brought up in the Fitz-Owen family almost as a sone -- and who is close to the younger son, William, but is disliked by the elder son, Richard. Sir Philip immediately notices a resemblance between Edmund and his late friend Arthur Lovel. The reader, of course, quickly guesses what's going on!

Four years later, Edmund having grown to the age of 18, the jealousy of Richard and especially of his friends has only grown, and they begin scheming to discredit him. Much of this is because Edmund and Lord Fitz-Owen's daughter, Emma, have fallen in love, and one of Richard's friends also wants her favors. It is time, too, for the young men to learn the arts of war, and they head off to France, where Ednmund distinguishes himself despite the schemes of Richard's friends. Upon their return to Lord Fitz-Owen's castle, things come to a head, as the scheming begins to have an effect on Lord Fitz-Owen. At the same time he is renovating an abandoned wing of the castle, which is rumored to be haunted. And so as a sort of trial, Endmund agrees to spend three nights in the haunted wing. Unsurprisingly, he is indeed haunted -- by the ghosts of Lord Arthur Lovel and his wife, and it becomes clear that they met their deaths by misadventure, and that Edmund is their son. In the end, Edmund leaves the Fitz-Owens and goes to Sir Philip Harclay, along with some proofs of his claims gained from visiting the peasant couple who had raised him until Lord Fitz-Owen took him into his household.

Not long after -- and only about two thirds of the way through the book -- Sir Philip agrees to help Edmund regain his rightful position. A letter is sent to Lord Walter Lovel, whom we now know arranged to have his kinsman murdered because he desired to have his wife for his own -- but she refused him and ran away, but died in childbirth due to the stress of fleeing. Walter Lovel refuses to admit his guilt, and what follows is a trial by combat. And then 50 pages or so of rather extended denouement, arranging for the fair disposal of everyone -- for Edmund to marry Emma and reclaim his father's title and castle, for Lord Fitz-Owen to be compensated for the castle he had innocently purchased, and even for Walter Lovel to have a chance at redemption after exile; and then a winding up of the future lives of Sir Philip, of the Fitz-Owens, and of course of Edmund and Emma.

I have to say I found the structure a bit confounding -- and I'm not the only reader! The book properly should have been wrapped up much more quickly after the trial by combat. The novel on the whole is just OK -- it's short enough that it's worth reading. The writing is not bad, very much of the 18th century in style, but well enough executed. It was Reeve's first novel -- she wrote a few more, a couple of contemporary novels and an historical novel, as well as poetry and nonfiction including an ambitious history of "Romance". It's true that The Old English Baron is more realistic in presenting its supernatural elements than The Castle of Otranto (which I haven't read but know the basics via synopsis.) But I felt in the end that a happy medium might have been achieved between the rather rudimentary haunts shown in this novel and the admittedly too over the top events from Otranto. (I am told that other Gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, or M. G. Lewis's The Monk, may be better examples of peak Gothic.)