7. Emily Eden - The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House

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EPISODE 7: Emily Eden (The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House)

AMY HELMES: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every Jane Austen fan wishes she could find more books in the vein of Jane Austen.

KIM ASKEW: They say you can never have too much of a good thing, right? So you can imagine how excited we were when we stumbled upon a little known (to us anyway) author who has been described as the19th century’s answer to Jane Austen… with a bit of Anthony Trollope thrown in, to boot.

AMY: Sounds like the perfect subject matter for this week’s “Lost Ladies of Lit,” the podcast about history’s forgotten female writers. Whether we’re introducing you to a new author or simply reminding you of one you always meant to get around to reading, our aim is to make sure these talented women don’t get overlooked. I’m Amy Helmes, and this is my pal and longtime writing partner, Kim Askew.

KIM: Hi, everyone. I can’t wait to discuss today’s “Lost Lady”: Emily Eden.

AMY: That name sounds so modern, doesn’t it, Kim? As if she should pop up in my email contacts, or, like she could be somebody I went to high school with maybe. And I wish I HAD known her in high school, because here’s a perfect example of an author I never knew existed, and as soon as I started reading her most well-known books, The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, I thought,  “Why did it take this long for me to find out about her?” 

KIM: And that’s become a recurring theme for us, that broken-record question which basically prompted us to start this podcast in the first place. We wanted to shout these ladies’ names from the rooftops, but we thought a podcast seems like a safer place to start.

AMY: Whenever I stumble upon some new-to-me, but generally forgotten female writer, I tend to feel a little annoyed that I’ve been denied all this time.

KIM: Yeah, but isn’t it also a little exhilarating to discover somebody like Emily Eden? It’s like finding buried treasure!

AMY: True. And better late than never in this case, for sure. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: We’re guessing Emily Eden is as unknown to most of you as she was to us. Amy, what do we know about her?

AMY: Well, she’s officially known as “The Honorable Emily Eden,” because she comes from a high-ranking British family at the turn of the 19th century. Her father, William, was a diplomat… he spent time in America and Ireland, and he was a minister at the court of Versailles. (Can you imagine?)

KIM: Wow.

AMY: He was also an ambassador to Spain and Holland, and because of all that, he was given a peerage in 1789 which resulted in the title Baron of Auckland.

So by the time Emily was born in 1797, her parents had settled back on their estate in Kent called Eden Farm. Her father devoted his time to politics, and her mother was busy rearing children (she had 14 total). Eden’s mother was said to be very cheerful with a great sense of humor, which is a trait she clearly passed on to her daughter. We see a lot of humor in her books. Emily was also tutored at home by governesses, which means she was extremely well-educated, and you see that on display with all of the literary and historical references she liberally sprinkles throughout her writing.

KIM: Yeah, it’s interesting that her novels are compared to Jane Austen, because her family was actually involved in the sort of romantic scandal that one might find in an Austen novel. 

AMY: And since we all love a good scandal, I will quickly explain that one: so Eden’s older sister, Eleanor, was the subject of intense public scrutiny when it was rumored that she was going to marry Prime Minister William Pitt, but when their relationship went public, Pitt actually denied having ever proposed to Eleanor, and that sparked her father’s fury, naturally. Eleanor wound up marrying an Earl instead, so she turned out okay, but the prime minister never married…and it was said that Eden’s sister — the one that got away — was the one true love of his life.

KIM: Wow, this really does sound like a novel, and it would be so interesting to know what the real story was there. So clearly, Emily had some fodder to inspire the romantic scandals she writes about later on in life. 

And that wasn’t the only novel-worthy event in her life — not at all. After their parents’ death, Emily and her younger sister, Fanny, ended up “setting up house” for their bachelor brother, George. So when he became governor general of India in 1835, the two sisters went with him, embarking on a five-month sailing voyage to India. Emily was 39 years old at the time when she arrived, and she called it “a hot land of strangers.”  She was always a little homesick and she really did not LOVE it there (she felt very out of her element as you might imagine), but she also managed to have this keen interest in her surroundings and the goings on, and she wrote down everything she observed in her trademark witty writing style. 

AMY: She said that their residence in India looked like “a palace out of Arabian Nights.” They received so much attention there and lived a very lavish existence, hosting weekly “open houses” and balls, and they also traveled throughout India for months at a time in a procession of camels, elephants, horses, carriages and foot soldiers and that way they were able to see a great deal of the country. So when she finally returned to England six years later in 1842, Eden published a book called Portraits of the People and Princes of India, as well as a collection of letters from her time in India, both of which were massive successes.

There’s a well-researched book that delves deeper into Eden’s time in India written by Jagmohan Mahajan called The Grand Indian Tour: Travels and Sketches of Emily Eden, which really captures that era in history, and we’ll link to to that in our show notes in case anyone is interested in reading more.

Eden also was an accomplished amateur artist. She did some amazing sketches and paintings from her time in India, and those are actually still on display at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. We’ll link to slides of her artwork as well. 

KIM: That all sounds worth checking out, for sure. It goes without saying that Eden had a lot of experience in society, hob-nobbing with influential, aristocratic people. She was very familiar with and extremely engaged in British politics, despite not having the right to vote herself. (And we see politics enter the plotline of her book Semi-Attached Couple.) She was a pretty renown political hostess for her party (the Whig party) and most of her friends were members of the upper class. 

AMY: So now that’s a pretty striking difference between her and Austen. Austen’s father was a middle-class clergyman who came from a much more modest social sphere. Yet like Austen, Eden’s writing focuses a lot on class, and social standings and snobbery. Not surprisingly, Jane Austen (whose books were published when Emily was a young woman) was her favorite author. 

KIM: Unlike Austen, Eden was financially independent, so she didn’t NEED to write to earn a living, she did it out of pure passion. Yet interestingly enough, Eden was similar to Austen in that she never married. Serving as “hostess” for her single brother, in her 30s and early 40s, however, did allow her to have the sort of domestic/household management role that married women of the day would have undertaken. So she was, in fact, “lady of the house” as an adult.

AMY: So Kim, apparently some people hoped that Emily would have ended up being the second wife of British prime minister William Lamb after his wife Caroline died. So I guess there was a possibility that she could have married. He was close friends with Eden, and folks thought they might end up together, but she said she was not interested because she found him “bewildering” and she was shocked by his profanity. Oh goodness! Honestly, when I was reading Semi-Attached Couple, in particular, there were moments when I thought to myself that Eden really didn’t seem to like men very much. Her portrayal of them in this book was none too flattering at times.

KIM: Yes, which we’ll circle back to later in our discussion. So while she may have chosen a life of spinsterhood, she was happy living with her brother and sister, until they both died, within three months of one another, in 1849. This was a moment of true grief for Eden, and her health deteriorated quite a bit after that, in part stemming from some chronic conditions from her time in India. She was very frail, physically, for the next 20 years, and rarely left her house. She died in 1869 at the age of 72. She seemed to live quite a life.

AMY: Yeah, absolutely.

KIM: So, let’s dive into the books! The Semi-Attached Couple was written at the tail end of the Regency Period, in 1829, and The Semi-Detached House was written some 30 years later. However, Semi-Detached House was PUBLISHED a year before Semi-Attached Couple, which ended up throwing Amy and I into a bit of a comedy of errors as we were preparing for this episode. 

AMY: Not the first time this has happened, by the way.

KIM: No, and not the last time either, I’m sure. So to spare you, our listener, any similar confusion, we should note that it doesn’t matter which of the books you read first. Despite the similarity of their titles, they have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. They can be read in any order.

AMY: When Virago Modern Classics republished these two books in 1982, 

 which stated: “The only thing more gratifying to find than a good book is a good book which has been neglected. “The Semi-Attached Couple,” written in 1829, published in 1860, popular for years, then largely forgotten, is a comic gem about how difficult it can be to get used to being married, even if you are young and beautiful and your husband is rich and titled. ….”

KIM: Oh, yes. And  I think the best way to describe these two novels is that they’re what happens after the “happily ever after” in a Jane Austen novel. Only the “happily ever after” part is suddenly up for serious debate.

AMY: So these two books basically pick up just after a typical Austen novel would have ended, with young women who are brand new wives and who aren’t at all sure (or happy) about the future. And in the case of Semi-Attached Couple, it really gets kind of dark! We’re introduced to Helen and Lord Teviot (which, think Mr. Darcy for Lord Teviot basically)... and just prior to the nuptials, Helen confides to her sister in an early chapter that she is having some second thoughts about marrying him! The book reads: “She had accepted Lord Teviot on an acquaintance of very few weeks, and that carried on solely in a ball-room or at a breakfast. …. She found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him.”

KIM: Oh boy. “Houston, we have a problem!” When you think about it, though, how courtships worked during this time period, it’s no wonder she felt this way. Couples were pretty much never given any time alone together. It was all formalities until right up to the wedding day. 

AMY: Yeah, it’s really a pretty stilted way to get to know anyone. I mean, thank god we live in a different time period. Anyway, Helen realizes it would be a disaster (and frankly not even a viable option) to call off the wedding, so she goes through with it, but she and her new husband end up having a number of very testy exchanges in the first few weeks of marriage, which become increasingly vicious. We’re told that they are both at fault. Helen is a bit too reserved and withholding in her affections — she comes across as cold to Lord Teviot. On the other hand, he has this sort of over-the-top adulation of her that she finds a turnoff, and when she doesn’t respond in the way he wants, he just gets angry. Kim, did you find yourself landing more on “Team Helen” or “Team Teviot”?

KIM: Great question, and I must say, probably no surprise, I landed on the side of Team Helen. Teviot had this unchecked temper, and he knew it, too! He basically drives Helen to distraction. He’s really jealous of her family and her friends. I feel like she keeps trying to connect with him, but he’s too busy being SUPER dramatic and self-involved to get it. 

AMY: It’s almost like Mr. Darcy in reverse, you know? He starts off looking great on paper and then all of a sudden he’s a jerk.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: He just seems like a selfish whiner to me, really. I didn’t like his hostility one bit, but I also kept thinking, “How on earth is Eden going to manage to turn things around for this couple? How is this even going to be possible?”

KIM: Teviot’s idea for smoothing things over is to invite a large retinue of houseguests to come visit… 

AMY: Because misery loves company, I guess.

KIM: In this case, absolutely. So a collection of both his friends and Helen’s friends and family arrive for this extended stay at their grand estate. Their presence does lighten Helen’s mood to a degree because she’s feeling homesick and I think it also is a bit of a buffer from Teviot’s MOODS, but it also stirs up even more drama, thanks to the presence of the fantastically bitchy Lady Portmore.

AMY: All right, she is probably my favorite character in the book, despite the fact that she’s completely hateable. She really ranks right up there with Austen’s Miss Bingley, Mrs. Elton, and Mary Crawford, don’t you think?

KIM: For sure. She’s downright insulting to everyone except her favorites — these gentlemen whom she claims all harbor secret obsessions with her. 

AMY: Of course, right?

KIM: Yes, of course. She’s also a narcissist to a comical degree. Eden writes: “One of the odd channels scooped out by Lady Portmore’s restless vanity was a persuasion that she was the world’s universal confidante; and she would enter into long arguments to prove that she must necessarily have foreknown any piece of intelligence or gossip that was imparted to her. Like all very vain people, she was contradictory; and this, added to her pretensions to universal knowledge, rendered her conversation a glorious mass of inconsistencies. 

   “I have heaps of news,” she said one morning when she came down to breakfast. “I dote upon letters, particularly from clever people, though it is a sad thing for me having the reputation of a good letter-writer to keep up. You know there is no vanity in saying so, for my letters are very original.”

AMY: Uggh. She’s just insufferable. And though she really doesn’t help matters when it comes to the Teviots’ faltering marriage, she’s kind of a paper tiger in that most people tend to just roll their eyes at her in the book. But one of the best scenes is when a woman named Mrs. Douglas, a character who comes from a lower social stratum, basically manages to run verbal circles around her. It was, like, a Regency-era mic drop moment if ever there was one.

KIM: I loved that exchange! And Lady Portmore isn’t the only person in the house party causing problems. There are two other unattached young ladies and three young men, and the men are this annoying combination of pointedly rude and narcissistically oblivious. 

AMY: One note I ended up jotting down was: “Men are jerks!” That’s simple enough. That was my take-away. So Eliza, who is Mrs. Douglas’s daughter, has a mad crush on Helen’s cousin, Colonel Beaufort, but he can’t be bothered to even remember her name. While she is repeating in her mind every obscure detail from the conversations they have had, Eden writes, “Little did she know that the ungrateful creature had dismissed from his mind all the conversations that had ever passed between them….. So it will be when young, ignorant girls fall in love as, I grieve to say, they often do with blasés men of the world.”

KIM: Yeah, so Eden really doesn’t manage to draw her male characters as well as she does her females. And there’s also an occasional problem with the perspectives in this book. Every now and then we were thrust into the first-person narrative of Helen’s maid. It was really distracting, and perhaps it was the fault of the edition we wound up reading on Kindle.

AMY: Yeah, it felt like it needed one more editorial pass, maybe.

KIM: Mmm-hmm. In any case, getting back to the story: Lord Teviot ends up being called away to Lisbon to take care of some matters, which only deepens the chasm that’s growing between him and his wife. During this time, there’s a bit of political intrigue that takes place amongst several characters who are running for parliament — it’s pretty funny — and this is where Eden’s interest in politics takes center stage.

AMY: You’d think this might be a dry section of the book, but I actually found it pretty interesting, especially in the build-up to our own presidential election this fall. There’s a nastiness in this depiction that I found quite familiar.

KIM: By the time we circle back to the drama between Helen and Lord Teviot, he is being brought back to England having fallen ill and fighting for his very life! Helen naturally rushes to his side. Enter the literary trope of the “high-tempered man turned helpless.”

AMY: Kept thinking of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, there, of course. 

KIM: Yep. Exactly.

AMY: Meanwhile, all the other young singletons are slowly falling into the matches they are supposed to end up in. And there’s no real surprise to the ending, but I’ll admit, I was satisfied with how Eden wraps things up… especially since earlier in the book I didn’t see how ANY of the men deserved a happy ending. So we’ve already kind of noted the similarities to Austen, obviously... 

KIM: But I also found a lot of parallels to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, too. Semi-Attached Couple reminded me of a much lighter Middlemarch in that Helen and Teviot have such clashing personalities a la Dorothea and Casaubon and Lydgate and Rosamund. And then Semi-Detached House, meanwhile, reminded me of a much lighter The Way We Live Now, in that they both involve a financial scandal and the schemy Baron and Baroness are a little bit similar to Trollope’s Melmottes. 

AMY: Speaking of Semi-Detached House, let’s jump on over to that one. I think if I had to choose which of these two books I liked better, it might be this one. It’s just kind of fluffy and fun for the most part. 

KIM: Yeah, I actually really enjoyed them both, but I felt the same way about Semi-Detached House. It ended up being my favorite, especially the second half, because I feel like it really found its feet. There were certain characters I really loved, and I thought the subplot was a little more intriguing than in House. 

AMY: Yeah. So class divisions are even more of a focus in Semi-Detached House. We start off, once again, with a relatively new bride, Blanche, a.k.a. “Lady Chester” who finds herself on her own and pregnant when her husband, Arthur, is called away on a mission to Berlin. So Arthur arranges for her  to live in a semi-detached house while he’s away, rather than on their grand estate, and Blanche is certain that this new living arrangement is going to be a nightmare. She has this sarcastic vision of how bad it’s going to be, and all her forecasts prove absolutely correct, but she winds up, at every turn, being surprisingly delighted by the horrors she imagined. 

KIM: Yes, her “semi-detached” neighbors, whom she imagines are going to be so awful, are all in a tizzy when they hear that Pleasance, the name of the main residence, is going to have a new tenant. It kind of reminded me of the Bennett family’s exclamations that “Netherfield Park is let at last!” in Pride and Prejudice. But there’s a little comedy of errors that happens (one of several throughout the book, in fact) when they mistakenly come to believe that Blanche is some sort of fallen woman. There are a lot of these snafus that happen that are hilarious.

AMY: Yes, to me it kept feeling like some 19th century episode of “Three’s Company,” but once the misunderstandings are all cleared up, Blanche takes a real liking to these solidly suburban neighbors, the Hopkinsons, and despite the fact that they would not normally be welcome into the same social circles she usually keeps, she takes the two daughters, Janet and Rose and their little cousin Charlie, who is an invalid, under her wing. 

KIM: Of course, this doesn’t sit well with THIS book’s social-climbing “mean girl,” Baroness Sampson.

AMY: And what a piece of work she is. Whew! The unfortunate part, though, is that Eden’s portrayal of the Baroness and her husband is unmistakably anti-Semitic.

KIM: Yeah, and, sadly, casual anti-semitism is the case with all too many books from that era, and then again, all the way through the Victorian era as well..  

AMY: Yeah, it’s disappointing, but just a head’s up that this part of the book will, and should, offend the modern reader. 

KIM: Yes. Though I did really like the redeeming member of the Baron and Baroness’s household: their niece, Rachel. For one, she quotes Shakespeare constantly (which annoys the Baroness to no end ) and she ends up being a bit of a secondary heroine of the novel. Of course, the Baron and Baroness get their comeuppance in the end. 

And meanwhile Blanche ends up helping Janet and Rose have a “happily ever after” with the men of their dreams, despite the concerns of her aunt who says: “My dear Blanche, I hope you are not going to turn match-maker; of all the dangerous manufacturies in the world, that is the worst, and the most unsatisfactory.” 

AMY: By the way, I’d like to point out, Kim, that I learned a new word from this book:

KIM: Okay, what is it?

AMY: “Spoony.” Did you know what that word meant when you were reading it?

KIM: No, I actually didn’t know what it meant, but I wondered if it had something to do with spooning?

AMY: No, actually. I looked it up and it’s derived from this carved wooden spoon that, in Welsh customs, a man would present to his fiance. So, a bit of 19th century British slang there. 

KIM: Weird.

AMY: So one character no one seems to be “spoony” about in this novel is Janet and Rose’s brother-in-law, Willis, who is SO TEDIOUS to be around, and yet I couldn’t help but love the guy. He is a widower who is just completely over-the-top in his grief, which is really a surprisingly funny thing to get to laugh at. 

KIM: Eden writes about him: “He had a passion for being a victim; when he was single, he grumbled for a wife, and when he had found a wife, he grumbled for the comforts of a bachelor. He grumbled for an heir to Columbia Lodge, and when the heir was born, he grumbled because the child was frail and sickly. In short, he fairly grumbled poor gentle Mrs. Willis out of the world, and then grumbled at her for dying.” 

AMY: So he actually ends up besotted with this woman who does not return the favor, and there’s this really funny scene where he asks for her hand in marriage and she basically does a spit-take of laughter. I loved that part of the book.

KIM: Yeah, that was hilarious.

AMU: But what happens to them by the ending is actually a somewhat unusual ending, but we won’t give that part away to you.

KIM: No we don’t want to say what happened, but I would agree it is pretty unusual. Blanche and Arthur end up moving back to their grand estate, and they end their time at the semi-detached house, though Blanche says, “It is a pity that Chesterton is not semi-detached…. A semi-detached castle would be lovely.”  

AMY: Yeah, so sweet!

KIM: A happy ending. So Amy, do you think the comparisons between Emily Eden and Austen are just?

AMY: Well, I don’t know. Do Eden’s novels measure up to Austen in terms of the sheer talent on the page? Definitely not, no. But I think these books are really a nice little nibble for anyone who loves Jane Austen and tales from that time frame. They’re really charming in their own way, and it’s really clear that Eden was a true fan of her predecessor. 

KIM: She obviously read Austen many times over, and she even references Austen’s novels in her books. They are a very light and enjoyable read. Highly recommended. But given the fact that Eden isn’t very well known to contemporary readers, it’s not that surprising there haven’t been any adaptations that we could find. I would actually love to see Andrew Davies take on either of these… his version of Sanditon, which debuted on PBS this year… I don’t know?

AMY: Yeah, I think he’d be up for the task. And Sanditon, by the way? Oh my gosh, we need to take a moment and talk about that, because it is so good in a trashy sort of way! There are not many highlights of 2020, but for me, Sanditon is one. And I know not everyone is keen on the whole idea of “sexing up Austen,” which is what he basically does in this TV series, but I, for one, am here for it. 

KIM: I was hanging on to every moment. Totally into it. And I think considering that we took some liberties with Shakespeare in our Twisted Lit YA series, we obviously aren’t going to be the ones to be offended by someone getting creative with a classic work of literature. So go, Andrew Davies! 

AMY: I remember watching Episode One and practically falling off the sofa at what I was seeing and then immediately texting all my Austen-loving friends, including you, Kim.

KIM: Oh, I remember that text. You’ve got to at least watch the first episode of this.

AMY: Watch the first episode and decide if it’s for you or not, but it’s… it’s… I liked it.

KIM: So moving off of that, what, if anything, have we learned from today’s episode?

AMY: Well, first off, we learned that whiny man-babies CAN be redeemed in literature simply by having a near-death experience. 

KIM: I think that’s great. We need more of those. We learned a new word for stupidly-smitten: “spoony.”

AMY: We learned that the bitchiest characters are almost always the best.

KIM: Uh-huh. No offense to heroines, but yep. And we learned that when you run out of Jane Austen books to read, Emily Eden is a fun follow-up.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode! For more information on this episode as well as further reading material, check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference.

[start closing music]

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Emily Eden and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Grant for our logo design. See you next time!

[closing music.]