Mary Brunton

Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Mary Brunton
MaryBrunton.jpg
From the 2nd edition of Emmeline (1820)
BornMary Balfour
(1778-11-01)1 November 1778
Died12 December 1818(1818-12-12) (aged 40)
OccupationNovelist
LanguageEnglish
Nationality Scottish
Notable worksSelf-Control
Discipline
Emmeline
35 Albany Street, Edinburgh 35 Albany St, Edinburgh.jpg
35 Albany Street, Edinburgh

Mary Brunton (née Balfour) (1 November 1778 – 7 December 1818) was a Scottish novelist, whose work has been seen as redefining femininity. Fay Weldon praised Brunton's writings as "rich in invention, ripe with incident, shrewd in comment, and erotic in intention and fact."

Contents

Life

Mary Balfour (married name Brunton) was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, a British Army officer, and Frances Ligonier, daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier and sister of the second earl of Ligonier. She was born on 1 November 1778 on Burray in the Orkney Islands. Her early education was limited, but her mother taught her music, Italian and French. [1]

About 1798, she met the Rev. Alexander Brunton, a Church of Scotland minister. Although her mother disapproved of the match, she eloped with Brunton on 4 December 1798, when he rescued her from the island of Gairsay in a rowing boat. [2] He was minister at Bolton, near Haddington, East Lothian, until 1797, then at two successive Edinburgh parishes: New Greyfriars from 1803 and Tron from 1809, becoming in the meantime Professor of Oriental Languages at the University in 1813. [1]

Their marriage was happy, and they had no children. Guided by her husband, she developed an interest in philosophy, and remarked in a letter to her sister-in-law that she was in favour of women learning ancient languages and mathematics, which was still a rare female accomplishment in that period. The couple made a tour to Harrogate and the English Lake District in 1809, although the former did not meet with her approval: "A scene without a hill seems to me to be about as interesting as a face without a nose!" (p. xxxii, Introduction) [2]

Brunton became pregnant at the age of 39. She died at their house, 35 Albany Street [3] in Edinburgh, on 12 December 1818, five days after giving birth to a stillborn son. [1]

She is buried against the western boundary wall of Canongate Kirkyard on the Royal Mile. Her husband is buried beside her.

Writings

The grave of Rev. Alexander Brunton and his wife Mary, Canongate Kirkyard The grave of Rev Alexander Brunton and his wife Mary Balfour, Canongate Kirkyard.jpg
The grave of Rev. Alexander Brunton and his wife Mary, Canongate Kirkyard

Brunton started her first novel, Self-Control , in 1809 and it appeared in 1811. One admirer was Charlotte Barrett (1786–1870), niece of the novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Burney and mother of the writer Julia Maitland. Writing to Sarah on 17 May 1811, Charlotte commented: "I read Self-Countroul & like it extremely all except some vulgarity meant to be jocular which tired me to death, but I think the principal character charming & well supported & the book really gives good lessons." [4] Jane Austen had reservations, judging it in a letter as an "excellently-meant, elegantly-written work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it." Brunton, in contrasting self-control with sensibility, was moving towards a redefinition of femininity. Self-Control was widely read and went into a third edition in 1812. A French translation (Laure Montreville, ou l'Empire sur soimême) appeared in Paris in 1829. [1] The anonymous novels Things by their Right Names (1812) and Rhoda by Frances Jacson were initially ascribed to her as well.

The other novel that Brunton completed was Discipline (1814). Like Walter Scott's Waverley , published in the same year, it was much appreciated for its Highland scenes. It reappeared twice in two years. The Bruntons spent some time in London in 1815 and Brunton began to learn Gaelic in the same year. She then planned a series of domestic stories, of which one, Emmeline, was far enough advanced when she died for her husband to include it in an 1819 memorial volume, along with a Memoir and extracts from her travel diary. The story describes with a sympathy unusual in the period how a divorced woman's marriage is destroyed by her feelings of guilt and the ostracism she suffers.

The success of Brunton's novels seems to have lain in combining a strongly moral, religious stance with events that stretched or broke the rules of society. Although the presence of "pulsating sexuality" may be an exaggeration, her heroines certainly "experience destitution struggling to survive as women on their own and enter the dark night of the soul, but rise from the depths of despair through a growing religious strength." [2] According to Fay Weldon, "Improving the Brunton novels may be, but what fun they are to read, rich in invention, ripe with incident, shrewd in comment, and erotic in intention and fact." [5]

The Works of Mary Brunton appeared in 1820 and further editions of her first two novels in 1832, 1837 and 1852. [1] However, their immediate popularity was somewhat short-lived: "They rose very fast into celebrity, and their popularity seems to have as quickly sunk away," as her husband put it in retrospect. [6] Modern editions have appeared of Self-Control (London: Pandora Press, 1986), Discipline (London: Pandora Press, 1986; Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1987) and Emmeline (London: Routledge, 1992, facsimile of the 1819 edition). [7]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Burney</span> English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright (1752–1840)

Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.

Elizabeth Meeke was a prolific English author, translator and children's writer, and the stepsister of Frances Burney. She wrote about 30 novels, published by the Minerva Press in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

<i>The Life and Loves of a She-Devil</i> Book by Fay Weldon

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a 1983 novel by British feminist author Fay Weldon. A story about a highly unattractive woman who goes to great lengths to take revenge on her husband and his attractive lover, Weldon stated that the book is about envy, rather than revenge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Hatton</span> British writer (1764–1838)

Ann Julia Hatton, was a popular novelist in Britain in the early 19th century and author of Tammany, the first known libretto by a woman.

Dale Spender was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the continuity of feminist activism and thought".

The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chawton House</span> Country house in Chawton, Hampshire, England

Chawton House is a Grade II* listed manor house in Hampshire on the South side of Chawton village, and the present building was started in 1580.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Burney</span> English novelist (1772–1844)

Sarah Harriet Burney was an English novelist. She was the daughter of the musicologist and composer Charles Burney and half-sister of the novelist and diarist Frances Burney. She had some intermittent success with her novels.

Frances Margaretta Jacson was an English novelist. Her work shows a strong moral purpose and insight into relationships and marriages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Egerton (actress)</span>

Sarah Egerton (1782–1847) was an English actress. The judgement of William Macready was that "her merits were confined to melodrama."

Alicia Le Fanu was an Irish poet and writer.

Francis Augustus Ligonier was a French-born officer of the British Army.

Caroline Burney was the pseudonym of the author of two early 19th-century three-volume novels published in London: Seraphina (1809) and Lindamira (1810). The real identity of the author has not been discovered.

Self-Control is a novel by the Scottish novelist Mary Brunton, published in 1811. The novel, which had some success in its own time, tells a rocambolesque tale, which inspired Jane Austen when she wrote her Plan of a Novel. Part of the author's intention in writing the work was to show "the power of the religious principle in bestowing self-command", while rebutting the idea that a reformed rake makes the best husband.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Brunton</span> Scottish minister

Alexander Brunton FRSE FSA was a Scottish minister in the Church of Scotland who rose to its highest rank, Moderator of the General Assembly in 1823. He was a noted academic, as Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of Edinburgh.

Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson was an English writer of children's books and novels. Some of her many chapbooks adapted existing novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances King (philanthropist)</span> English philanthropist and author

Frances Elizabeth "Fanny" King, néeBernard was an English philanthropist and author.

<i>Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen</i> 1986 feminist literary study

Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Isabelle Bour: Brunton , Mary... In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004; online e. October 2005). Retrieved 18 November 2010. Subscription required.
  2. 1 2 3 Ruth Facer, author biography on Chawton Library site. Dated June 2012.
  3. Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1818–19
  4. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. Lorna J. Clark (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 130 and 133n.
  5. Fay Weldon: Introduction. In: Mary Brunton: Discipline (London: Pandora Press, 1986), p. vii.
  6. Alexander Brunton: Memoir. In: Mary Brunton: Emmeline with some other pieces (Edinburgh: Manners & Miller, 1819), p. cv. Quoted by Ruth Facer.
  7. Bibliographical information collated with the British Library Integrated Catalogue and Chawton Library site Retrieved 19 November 2010. Archived 15 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine