The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett

 

Do you like to read books that inspired your favorite authors?  I do as I feel it gives me a great background on why they made the artistic choices that they did about their novels.  This novel was selected as the JASNA Northwoods selection for this month as Jane Austen read and appreciated this book.  I also found a great quote from Edgar Allan Poe about it.

"I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it. It diverted me exceedingly. I have torn through the third volume; I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque..." - Jane Austen

"Everybody has read [The Heroine]. There is no one so superlatively unhappy as not to have done this thing. But if such there be - if by any possibility such person should exist, we have only a few words to say to him. Go, silly man, and purchase forthwith 'The Heroine: or Adventures of Cherubina.' There are few books written with more tact, spirit, näiveté, or grace, [...] and none more fairly entitled to rank among the classics of English literature than the Heroine of Eaton Stannard Barrett." - Edgar Allan Poe, in The Southern Literary Messenger (1835)

With such praise, I was very excited to read this novel on my Kindle.  Unfortunately, it was a “did not finish” novel for me.  I was not engaged with the story and kept falling asleep whenever I tried to read it.  I made it roughly halfway through and decided to move on to a more engaging book. 

Cherry Wilkinson is the daughter of a country squire and has read too many Gothic novels.  She discovers a scrap of paper with a few words on it that seem to her to mean that she is actually the daughter of a lord.  Her father has informed her that an old childhood friend, Stuart, is coming to visit.  She sets off to London before he arrives to find her “true identity,” renaming herself Cherubina de Willoughby.  She meets an actor and a poet with nefarious purposes, and refuses to return with either her father or Stuart who come to find her.  She has over the top adventures and I just kind of gave up on Cherry.  It was too over the top for me.  This was a popular type of fiction at the time, but I much prefer Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which is more subtle, better written, and have more believable characters.

We had our book club meeting today and most members, like me, stopped reading it as well.  It is an epistolary novel written by Cherry as letters to her governess.  Luckily, I was able to find out the ending in book club, and it did end the way I assumed it would.

When do you not finish a book?

Book Source:  Purchased on Amazon.com.  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.