REEVE, Clara.
The Exiles; or Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt … London: Printed for T. Hookham … 1788.
Three vols, 12mo, pp. I: xiii, [2], xiv-xxiv, 209, [3 (ads and errata)], II: [2], 293, [3 (ads and errata)], III: [2], 277, [1 (ads)]; lacking the half-titles (as with all the other copies we have handled), and the terminal advertisement leaf in vol III, but with the errata leaves; paste-on slip to title-verso in vol. I noting that the novel is ‘[Entered at Stationers’ Hall] October 25th 1788’; a good copy in contemporary half calf with marbled sides; rubbed, spine labels wanting; ownership signature ‘M Downshire’ B1 in vols I and II and to title-page in vol. III, Hillsborough monogram gilt to spine (see below).
First edition, a gothic romance by the author of The Old English Baron (1777).
In the preface Reeve explains the book’s conception. A gentleman friend looking for a hobby to relieve the ‘ennui’ of fashionable life asked her to ‘give him a share’ in writing her next novel. Her solution was to plan a loosely-linked story of three acquaintances, a German, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, citizens of the world, ‘men of cultivated minds and enlarged hearts’, who meet in their travels ‘and after they are separated, they are to give each other an account of their lives and adventures’. Reeve’s friend asked to take the Frenchman and the Englishman, and she agreed to write the tale of the German. Conquered, perhaps, by his ennui her friend soon abandoned the project and Reeve laid aside her part of the tale, putting ‘the MS. into a drawer, among other beginnings without ends’. After several years, having in the meantime published The Progress of Romance (1785) and written an Irish ghost story, Castle Connor, which was lost in manuscript in the Ipswich coach, she finally ‘picked up the broken thread of her narration’ and finished The Exiles as a German story, reducing the Frenchman and the Englishman to incidental figures. The preface which explains all this provides an unusually good picture of a professional author at work.
Like most of Reeve’s novels The Exiles is a gothic romance with a conscientious moral tone. The Count de Cronstadt secretly marries a beautiful and virtuous woman, who is, however, the daughter of a peasant. His wealthy bachelor uncle, with firm ideas about the class of ‘children that are to inherit my fortune’, forces him into a second marriage with a noblewoman. ‘Oh, how one false step leads to another!¬—the story of Cronstadt would be a warning to all that believe—Polygamy is capable of increasing a man’s pleasure or happiness.’ The broken-hearted first wife dies, and Cronstadt, overcome by remorse, soon follows her to the grave.
Provenance: from the library of Mary Hill (née Sandys, 1764–1836), Marchioness of Downshire and later Baroness Sandys, a wealthy heiress, society hostess, and literary patron who married the young but ill-fortuned politician Arthur Hill in 1786. Raised by her uncle, one of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Streatham worthies’, she became a friend of both the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert, and once entertained the Prince for four days at the family seat of Ombersley. She built up a fine collection of contemporary fiction, mostly by women, to add to the family library.
This novel was evidently acquired after 1793, when she became Marchioness of Downshire, but before her new Downshire monogram was in use; it was almost certainly bought and read by her when still in sheets – some of the ink from her ownership signature in volume I (on the first leaf of the main text) has transferred to the terminal errata leaf and the title-page.
Garside 1788:68.