Born at Ipswich, the daughter of the rector of Freston, translated Barclay’s “Argenis” (1772), and wrote “The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story” (1777), renamed “The Old English Baron,” which was avowedly an imitation of Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto.” She wrote four other novels and “The Progress of Romance” (1785).
General
Have you seen “The Old Baron,” a Gothic story, professedly written in imitation of Otranto, but reduced to reason and probability? It is so probable, that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story. Mrs. Barbauld’s “Fragment” was excellent. This is a caput mortuum.
The yet unsated pleasure which I had received from repeated perusals of the “English Baron,” excited an affectionate regard for its author, and solicitude for her fame.
This romance [“The Old English Baron”] is announced as an attempt to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance, with the incidents and feelings of real life. The latter, however, are sometimes too accurately represented, and the most important and heroic characters in the work exhibit a natural anxiety about settlements, stocking of farms, and household furniture, which ill assimilates with the gigantic and awful features of the romance.
The various novels of Clara Reeve are all marked by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a competent command of those qualities which constitute a good romance. They were, generally speaking, favourably received at the time, but none of them took the same strong possession of the public mind as “The Old English Baron,” upon which the fame of the author may be considered as now exclusively rested…. In no part of “The Old English Baron,” or of any other of her works, does Miss Reeve show the possession of a rich or powerful imagination. Her dialogue is sensible, easy, and agreeable, but neither marked by high flights of fancy, nor strong bursts of passion. Her apparition is an ordinary fiction, of which popular superstition used to furnish a thousand instances, when nights were long, and a family, assembled around a Christmas log, had little better to do than to listen to such tales. Miss Reeve has been very felicitously cautious in showing us no more of Lord Lovel’s ghost than she needs must—he is a silent apparition, palpable to the sight only, and never brought forward into such broad daylight as might have dissolved our reverence. And so far, we repeat, the authoress has used her own power to the utmost advantage, and gained her point by not attempting to step beyond it. But we cannot allow that the rule which, in her own case, has been well and wisely adopted, ought to circumscribe a bolder and a more imaginative writer.
That the “Old English Baron” was only seventy years ago esteemed by critics an excellent work of fiction, and became very popular, are facts that most forcibly declare the advance made during the last two generations in education and general intelligence.
As in Walpole’s book [in the “Champion of Virtue”], there are a murder and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine sentiment and stilted dialogue—that “old perfumed, powdered D’Arblay conversation,” as Thackeray called it—which abound in “Evelina,” “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce his disciple’s performance tedious and insipid, as he did.
