Mary Meeke (d. 1816)

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are accurately described as the "Age of Revolution". The political revolutions in America and France along with the industrial revolution and the rise of modern science are typically the markers by which scholars delineate the emergence of "modernity". Paralleling these revolutions was an artistic revolution away from the static neo-classicism of the Enlightenment and toward a volatile, dynamic sensibility more attune to a time when ideas were in constant flux. Similarly, a moral revolution was taking place that called into question the assumptions hitherto thought of as given in societies that had been dominated by Church and State (aristocracy).

But behind all these emerging impulses lies perhaps the most important "revolution": the revolution in literacy. With the emergence of greater literacy in Western societies in the middle of the eighteenth century, we see the foundation by which all of the later cultural revolutions can take place. Many scholars point to the publication (and subsequent popularity) of Richardson's novel Pamela in 1743 as the starting point for the modern novel, though, arguably, the works of Defoe some twenty years before can also lay claim to the title. Soon after, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) challenges the realism and "modern" sensibility of Richardson and Defoe by introducing the fantastic, that, in itself, with its hearkening back to an age of mystery and imagination - most importantly imagination - is a fundamental element of the modern consciousness. The seesaw between the gothic imagination and the realistic imagination is what makes Romanticism. And Romanticism is the first full literary and artistic expression of Modernity.

From this backdrop comes the novelist Mary Meeke, whose works are symptomatic of this rise of literacy and the emergence of the Modern. Mary Meeke was one of the most popular and successful novelists during the Gothic boom of the 1790's and 1800's, but she quickly disappeared from literary history, as have many "popular" writers before and after her. But, as in all periods, popular writers like Meeke have much to tell us about the public culture, and the literary culture, of their time. Consequently, in order for us to have a more complete picture of cultural and literary history, it is imperative that we continue to explore and rediscover heretofore forgotten authors so that we can enhance and extend our understanding of the past in the hopes that this will shed further light on our own present and imagined future. In his introduction to Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, Montague Summers (who should be acknowledged as a proto-recovery scholar) wrote, "even the smaller names and lesser currents of our literature have their value, their direction, their proportionate and material worth." (xxvii) This statement, written in the 1930's by a then eccentric outsider, rings clear in our time when "recovery" has become a scholarly buzz word. Using Summers' admirable example and the advantages of the electronic medium, the opportunity to reintroduce a writer like Mary Meeke into the Romantic literary scene is now at hand.

Mary Meeke's personal biography remains somewhat sketchy. Though she is listed in almost all recent literary encyclopedias, her life outside of her books is little known, and the information these encyclopedias provide is little different from the DNB entry of a century ago. Mary Meeke seems to have been the wife of a Reverend Francis Meeke, a Staffordshire clergyman, who died in 1801. Mrs. Meeke died some years later in 1816, but we do not know when she was born. Meeke's first novel, Count St. Blancard, appeared in 1795, so we can guess that she was born sometime between 1755 and 1775. A portrait available on the Sheffield Hallam Corvey website (http://www2.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/authors/MM4-f.jpg) shows an attractive, yet stern, woman foregrounding a stormy crimson skyline that certainly enhances her reputation as a Gothic novelist. She appears to be in her late thirties or early forties. Presumably, this portrait dates from the period of her writing success which would leave us to believe that the second decade of the above estimate is more accurate. Some early commentators speculated that she may have been of Italian heritage because she used the pseudonym "Gabrielli", which was thought to be her maiden name, but there is no foundation for this speculation.

Count St. Blancard was the first of 34 novels that have been attributed to Meeke. Given her use of pseudonyms and the commonality of anonymous novels at the time, it is quite possible that she wrote more, though given the length of most of her works - three and four deckers! - it seems unlikely that she could have written much more than what has already been attributed to her. Many of these were published under the name Mrs. Meeke. These include: The Abbey of Clugny (1795), Palmira and Ermance (1797), Ellesmere (1799), Which is the Man? (1801), Midnight Weddings (1802), A Tale of Mystery (1803), Amazement (1804), The Old Wife and Young Husband (1804), Murray House (1804), The Nine Days Wonder (1804), Ellen, Heiress of the Castle (1807), There's a Secret, Find It Out (1808), Matrimony, the Height of Bliss or Extreme of Misery (1811), Conscience (1814), Spanish Campaigns (1815), The Veiled Protectoress (1819), and What Shall Be, Shall Be (1823). She wrote a number of novels under the aforementioned pseudonym "Gabrielli", including The Mysterious Wife (1797), The Sicilian (1798), Harcourt (1799), The Mysterious Husband (1801), Independence (1802), Something Odd (1804), Something Strange (1806), Laughton Priory (1809), and Strategem's Defeated (1811). The Gabrielli novels are thought to be more exotic than the ones published under her own name, and many of the Gabrielli novels are much longer: all four deckers, except Something Odd. Meeke published most of her novels with the Minerva Press. She also translated a number of works from French and German, notably two more four deckers, Lobenstein Village by Augustus La Fontaine (1804) and Julian by Ducray Dumeneil (1807), in the midst of her own years of most prolific writing! She is particularly noted for finishing the translation of Klopstock's Messiah in 1811. The fact that her translations were from the French and the German, none apparently from Italian, further makes suspect the speculation on her ancestry.

As one of the premier writers in the Minerva Press stable, "her books were well-known, well-read, and well-liked," (Todd 460) Meeke wrote about the writer's life and the literary marketplace in the Preface to her novel Midnight Weddings. John Garrett describes this best: "Mrs. Meeke, like some primordial Agatha Christie, was perhaps writing for gain, and she made no bones about confessing her belief in faithfully following the shifting demands of the fickle public. Thus in the Preface to Midnight Weddings, she advised her fellow fledgling-novelists always to consult their publisher as to how they might best satisfy the reading tastes of the moment." (xvi) This anecdote has been cited repeatedly and has been used as a way to scoff at Mrs. Meeke as a market driven writer who by implication is producing mere trash and is unworthy of further attention from scholars. In the DNB, this is considered "naïve". Stanley Kunitz's dated British Authors of the Nineteenth Century lambastes her work as, "pure trash of the commercial variety; in fact, she advised budding novelists to consult their publishers before starting a book, so as to be sure of writing what readers like!" Today, this exclamatory incredulousness on the part of the critic is quite funny. Particularly now that the scholarly climate has itself begun to change is her statement really all that bad? Certainly we could imagine Dickens as saying something similar (indeed, and because Dickens himself clearly wrote for a "popular" audience his own reputation has suffered at times within the scholarly conversation). This kind of criticism is all too unpleasantly like those issued by Dryden a century and a half before Meeke when he lambasted the then popular poets Robert Wild and Richard Flecknoe who soon dropped off the literary radar. But Wild was enormously popular after the Restoration and to erase him from the literary landscape is to leave the scene incomplete. In order to understand a period, we need to examine all of its discourse. Even when that discourse is, as Stephen King describes his own work, "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries."

Meeke's novels are admittedly formulaic. They hinge on a plot featuring a young man who is heir to a large estate and/or title but because of some circumstance has been denied knowledge of this, as the novel progresses the hero comes into his inheritance and all of the intrigues are resolved, this being a basic inheritance plot. Some critics see this as fostering conservative social values, which indeed it probably does (see Sage, Todd, Varma). But isn't this sort of thing typical of a "popular" writer? In other words, a popular writer is popular because of the continuity of their stories and their generally implicit support of mainstream values. A good recent example is the phenomenal success of John Grisham. Grisham has written novel after novel featuring a renegade lawyer who bucks the system and exposes the corruption inherent in the American legal system, and this formula made him the most successful novelist in the 1990's. Grisham's novels work because they at once suggest what readers like to believe, "Grisham regularly fulfills the American need to believe that the small man can succeed against the establishment" (Rogers 278), yet tacitly supports the very system it pretends to undermine, thus supporting what his readers truly believe (e.g. "By God, we're doing the best we can in this society"). A couple of years ago, Grisham wrote a novel, A Painted House, essentially a southern coming of age story in the vein of William Styron, that went outside this formula, and though it sold as well as his previous efforts, his readers, in general, hated it. They hated it because it wasn't a "John Grisham novel", that is, a novel about lawyers. What this tells us is the "popular" writer is also an important gauge of the cultural climate of a period, whether we like it or not. In the future, those studying the 1990's would be remiss if they forsook the work of a writer like Grisham and only studied the comprehensive, but unread (and perhaps unreadable), Infinite Jest of David Foster Wallace.

Meeke's novels are generally not straight Gothic in nature. In The Gothic Quest, Montague Summers distinguishes between the terror-gothic and the sentimental-gothic. Summers regards Meeke as one of the foremost practitioners of the latter. (30) Frederick Frank points out that as reader's tastes changed, Meeke progressively de-gothified her novels and moved more toward domestic fiction. (241) Thus Meeke's novels move toward a more recognizable nineteenth century novelistic discourse. Indeed, Meeke's Something Strange, for example, seems to anticipate Dickens more than it points back to Radcliffe, with its modern setting and concern for contemporary affairs, though there's still plenty of gothic elements.

Meeke is infamously known as Thomas Babington Macauley's "favorite bad novelist". Like Wild in relation to Dryden, she has been reduced to a footnote to a more well-known figure. Indeed, the Victorian era DNB contributor saw her in this way: "Although her plots are commonplace, and her literary style poor, and her characters only faintly reflect contemporary manners, she had some distinguished readers." (210) Meeke's contribution, thus, is solely as a pastime for either Macauley or Miss Mitford. In his letters to his sister Hannah, Macauley refers to Mrs. Meeke several times and shows a keen interest and enthusiasm for her work: "I wish that I knew where my old friend Mrs. Meeke lives. I would certainly send her intelligence of the blessed effects of her writings. (March 20, 1827; V. 1, 219) Referring to a novel he had recently read in 1833, The Invisible Gentleman by James Dalton, and greatly disliked, Macauley wrote, "I have sent it back to Lowe, and intend to take the taste out of my mouth by recurring to Laughton Priory or Strategem's Defeated." (June 21, 1833; V. 2, 260) Thus we are given the impression that for Macauley Mrs. Meeke was not a mere "trash" novelist. Nowhere does he actually refer to her as a "bad novelist". What he does say is, "for my tastes are incurably vulgar, as you may perceive by my fondness for Mrs. Meeke's novels. (Dec. 24, 1832; V. 2, 216) But this is in reference to a decorous dinner he has attended during his political escapades and it seems to suggest that Macauley is using Mrs. Meeke as a way to express the fact that he is an outsider, a rebel amongst cultivated society. This is in no way to suggest that Mrs. Meeke is a "bad novelist"; rather it suggests that Macauley is recognizing the subversive element in the gothic novel and identifying this with his own unconventional manners and political views. Macauley so enjoyed Mrs. Meeke's novels that he was gathering a library of them to take with him to India. (Dec. 10, 1833, V. 2, 358) Again, we see here that Macauley's pleasure in rereading Mrs. Meeke's novels repeatedly points toward the similar uses to which writers like Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy have been put to use, suggesting an impact beyond light entertainment. In Meeke, Macauley found something by which he could help define his world and his own place within it.

Mary Russell Mitford was also an enthusiastic reader of Meeke's work. Macauley and Mitford were the generation right after Meeke's; after that she dropped off the radar until that enthusiastic antiquarian Montague Summers went in search of the gothic past. Summers describes his enthusiasm for the gothic novel in his study The Gothic Quest. As a child, Summers discovered a number of gothic three and four deckers in the family library. Later, intrigued by the titles in Austen's Northanger Abbey, Summers began searching for these books that were assumed to have been made up by the author. Among the writers he discovered was Mrs. Meeke. Summers was going to follow up his study with a sequel, The Gothic Achievement, which was going to explore the works of Meeke, along with many others, but he died before this work was finished. In 1977, the Arno Press issued a reprint of Meeke's first novel Count St. Blancard that was edited by another Gothic enthusiast, Devendra Varma for a series of Gothic reprints. Since then, Meeke has found her place in all recent literary encyclopedias, particularly now that a number have been issued that exclusively consider women writers. Finally, the recovery of Meeke, along with so many other writers from the Romantic period, will rapidly expand due to the discovery of the works in Castle Corvey and the subsequent launch of the Corvey Project. It cannot be understated how important the Corvey collection is in our remapping of this era. Many of the works in the Corvey simply are unavailable anywhere else. Summers spent years tracking down gothic novels eighty years ago, often unsuccessfully, and many have obviously since disappeared due to the ravages of time (not to mention war and simple disinterest). Now some of these long lost novels have reemerged and are no longer mere listings in a bibliography.

Mary Meeke's voice, the voice of the popular novelist, has largely been a voice missing in Romantic era scholarship. But this missing voice is an important one in our understanding of not only Romanticism, but Modernity itself. As John Garrett notes, "The works of Mrs. Meeke play their part in expressing something of the prevailing zeitgeist of the age which produced the Romantic poets." (xxix) And, as Garrett furthers notes, her works "may often fail to move, they seldom cease to entertain." (xxvi) This ability to entertain that is seen in Meeke's work is in direct line with Dickens, Dumas, Gaskell, and other post-romantic novelists (let alone King and Grisham). Whereas many writers before Dickens are tough reading for today's reader, Mrs. Meeke's ability to tell a story and her sense of plot intricacies and intrigue make her novels a worthwhile object of study in showing the development of the novel, for Mrs. Meeke contributes to the development of that most loathsome form (for scholars) of literature: the popular genre novel. But, at the end of the day, we must admit that the conventions of the so-called "popular" novel are inherent in all of the truly great novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from Mary Shelley to Dickens to Dostoyevsky to Sartre to Eco - and that this development began as Modernity got underway and "popular" culture emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mary Meeke, as an early practitioner of "popular" fiction, can only further enhance our understanding of the novel from the emergence of the Modern to the present day.

- Prepared by Michael Page, University of Nebraska, November 2002.