MARY CHADWICK
Anna Maria Bennett (c. 1745-1808) was one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She wrote six novels between 1785 and 1806:Anna: or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (1785),Juvenile Indiscretions (1786),Agnes de-Courci: a Domestic Tale (1789),Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794),The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797) andVicissitudes Abroad (1806). Her first novel, Anna, sold out on the day of publication and, in 1794,Ellen saw a second edition just three months after the first. Bennett was praised highly by many reviewers including Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who describedThe Beggar Girl as “the best novel … since [Henry] Fielding”. She was also compared very favourably to Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, who are now part of the canon of eighteenth-century fiction, and her works were read by Jane Austen and her family, feeding into Austen’s juvenilia and the development of her own writing.
Over the last few decades Bennett has received somewhat sporadic critical and readerly attention. Feminist scholars have explored her portrayals of women’s work and socio-economic position in late eighteenth-century Britain, and researchers who consider British literary history with a focus on Wales have paid particular attention to Bennett’s two Wales-related novels,Anna andEllen. Bennett’s works mark a transitional stage in British fiction writing. The pacing of her novels is often fast and lively. Her main characters are drawn to be largely engaging or repellent but they are rarely two-dimensional or lacking in nuance, and her supporting cast members are provided with personality and depth. Bennett’s novels reflect the canonical texts of the eighteenth century; she looks back to the tropes and motifs used by Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding, notably in her humour and satire, her comic characterisation, and her development of plots centred on orphans who navigate choppy courses through early adulthood before finding security through marriage or inheritance or both. At the same time, she foreshadows nineteenth-century novelistic developments. Her narrative voice sometimes takes on the ironic tone for which Austen would become known and her depictions of gender and class relations have been described by Miranda Burgess as a forerunner of Dickens’ social novels.Ellen is marked by literary trends such as the Gothic, by the ongoing processes of the integration of Welsh culture and people into Great Britain, by contemporary ideas about female education, and by the experiences of Bennett and her daughter as mistresses of wealthy, high profile men. Writing at a time of great personal stress, Bennett spun these themes together to create a text which, while sometimes contradictory or ambiguous, has a gripping plot, engaging characters, and a wealth of detail regarding late eighteenth-century life in a society which was marked by both tradition and transition.
The details of Bennett’s early life re
