Helen by Maria Edgeworth

Helen Reviews

• 
  Melindam

  Can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg
  link to free copy .
  
  3,5 stars
  
  “... I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another- we are an injured body.” Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
  
  “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”. Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
  
  After reading & re-reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey where - next to ridiculing the exaggerations of gothic novels - she so admirably defends the merits of novels in general and novels of her contemporaries (Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth) in particular, I started checking them out (Henry Fielding – it will be your turn next!).
  
  Fanny Burney’s books (Camilla, Evelina) were enjoyable enough, though her perfecty-perfect heroines and exaggerated characters were exasperating. I found Maria Edgeworth’s books, with more realism – albeit still with a proclivity of flawless heroines – and with less extravagance & embellishment, much more to my liking. On this footing, I enjoyed “Helen” a lot, though the titular main character is an undeniable, tiresome goody two-shoes.
  
  The novel starts conveniently as a comedy of manners/courtship: impoverished orphaned Helen Stanley is offered “shelter” by her rich, recently-married childhood friend Cecilia Clarendon & her mother Lady Davenant (actually giving preference to Helen over her own daughter as H is perfect, while C, as a simple human, has her flaws). Helen –after some hethinks/shethinks misunderstandings – gets happily betrothed to Granville Beauclerc, an ideal, rich young man, and as such, another favourite of Lady Davenant.
  
  In the second half the plot gets more dramatic & intense and the focus moves to Helen’s friend, Lady Cecilia & her marriage to the loving, but extremely straight-laced General Clarendon. Cecilia is charming and beguiling, but prone to telling little lies, which seems harmless enough, but soon entangle her, Helen, the General & Beauclerc in a dangerous web that threatens with both social & personal destruction.
  
  Previously to marrying Cecilia, General Clarendon wanted to know, if she had loved any other man before. She, afraid that honesty – she had had a silly, indiscreet correspondence with an ignoble roué, now dead – would mean losing him, denied that she had.
  Someone, however, sends the letters to the General and a terrified Cecilia tells that the letters were written to Helen. To save Cecilia’s marriage Helen goes along with the deception though its consequences are almost disastrous for more than just herself.
  
  Despite Helen being the MC, the story seems to belong much more to Cecilia and despite her faults, Maria Edgeworth depicts her as a character you can relate to (much more than to Helen) and you can forgive. For what she does is morally condemnable, but in a way her morally upright and utterly daunting husband, whom she loves nevertheless, and the fear of losing him drove her to the deception in the first place.
  
  However, after the almost-disaster, the requisite moralisation & teaching Cecilia and the readers some valuable lessons, Edgeworth benevolently releases us all to a happy ending.
• 
  Marija

  Helen is the kind of novel where one should not focus on plot. In truth, the plot is very silly; but what redeems this novel is Edgeworth’s character studies—the social and emotional impact on deception and concealment. It is truly amazing how something so insignificant and trivial—school girl deceptions and concealment—can be blown out of proportion, on the brink of becoming a social nightmare for all involved. This is the most interesting part of the novel, and I can easily understand why authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell would develop this theme in their own subsequent works.
  
  I will give Edgeworth credit for creating a balanced work in regards to both plot and character. No one is left unscathed in this story. The characters are perfectly matched. Each character is guilty in some way or another, whether it be the cause of some deception or due to the maintenance of some unworthy principle or belief. Other characters are guilty of making hasty decisions without fully considering the consequences of their choices. By the novel’s end, it is impossible for any of the characters to say that they were more right or just in their deeds and actions over another. There is no sacrificial offering to be made; each understands that they were equally at fault. I admire Edgeworth for doing this.
  
• 
  Daniel

  Helen is of the moralistic novel variety, and while it is more character driven than typical of the style IMO, the characters do serve (and suffer a little from) the overarching point of the story.
  
  The length got a little tedious, I must admit, but it did serve to illustrate the value of truth and honesty, even when falsehood seems necessary for the happiness of the deceived party, in reality it only causes more pain and distrust.
  
  Helen is one of those angelically virtuous heroines that are a little hard to believe. She is entirely lovable and so unselfish she continually allows her friend Cecilia to take advantage of her, eventually to the agony of both. Cecilia is one of those good people without strong moral character who take the easiest route through life, lying whenever the truth seems like it would cause pain, much to her gradual sorrow.
  
  The heroes of the story, Granville Beauclerc and General Clarendon are rather severely underdeveloped. Both are too good to be true (they do have their little faults, though they seem tacked on for effect), and spend the entire story urging Helen and Cecilia to be frank and truthful. Honestly, while I like him, I never saw much in Beauclerc. He's headstrong and too fanciful for my taste, and Helen is a little flat. Other than her goodness, about all we know of her is that she plays the harp, has handwriting almost identical to Cecilia, and is a pushover.
  
  Lady Davenant is the most interesting character of the book in my opinion. She is certainly the voice of reason throughout.
  As I said, the characters serve the theme, and their personal quality is low because of it. The contrasts between characters, and the teaching moments created by them are their great purpose. The good are very good, and the bad are very bad.
  
  Helen is worth reading as a classic, and also for it's thought provoking content, but don't go in expecting plot, or Austen quality wit and commentary.
• 
  Laura

  Free download available at
  Project Gutenberg.
• 
  Frances

  Maria Edgeworth was the best-selling author in Jane Austen's time, and it's not hard to see why. In Helen, she sketches some really excellent characters so that you sympathise with almost all of them. This novel is the inspiration behind Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, except there's actually more drama in Helen than there is in WaD.
  
  My favourite character would have to be Esther Clarendon, even though she does not appear very often. She is a very clear sighted young woman and brutally honest and straightforward, completely unlike the other young highborn ladies of her day. If Elizabeth Bennet were richer, and less of a romantic, she'd be Esther Clarendon.
  
  The story is based on a web of lies spun by Lady Cecilia Clarendon, wife of General Clarendon, Esther's brother. Cecilia probably rates as one of the worst friends ever, as she convinces her friend Helen Stanley to lay claim to a series of scandalous love letters that she wrote, and thus take the fall for her. At first, Cecilia promises Helen she'll tell the whole truth to her husband, but then she backs out, afraid that her husband might scorn her for it. Therefore, Helen is left to take the blame.
  
  If you like Austen, I'd encourage you to give this a try.
• 
  Julie Wake

  A really super book. Apparently she was Jane Austen's greatest rival at the time, but she is obviously nowhere near as popular these days.
  The book has similarites to Austen but is slightly racier (!) and really does involve you in the lives of the characters.
• 
  Grace Harwood

  This is a fairly hefty book but so worth it. I loved Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and this novel (no. 10 in the Kindle series of her complete works which are available FREE is equally brilliant). In the novel, Helen, the impoverished friend of the rich and newly married Cecilia, moves in with her friend as her companion. At first all is well, but then secrets start to be revealed and Cecilia asks Helen to cover for her so that she doesn't get into trouble with her stern husband. Helen is so obliging and kind that she does this and ends up in a right pickle, nearly losing her own reputation and risking her own marriage and happiness in the end. At the end of the novel, it is shown that Cecilia is utterly unworthy of Helen's virtuous and constant friendship, although Edgeworth cleverly hints that this is the case along the way by using the free indirect discourse narrative technique that authors like Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith use to such good effect.
  
  It may seem that there's a lot of superfluous information in the first volume, but there is not a thing here that is unnecessary - it's all required to set the scene successfully so that the reader can make accurate judgements about the characters Helen is living amongst during her trials. By the end, I was reading breathlessly - I couldn't get through it fast enough. There are points when I could hardly bear to watch as poor Helen's better nature led her into one devious trap after another by a conniving and corrupt upper-class society. This is just such a fantastic novel - highly recommended and completely FREE so there's no way you can go wrong with this.
• 
  Kim

  I thoroughly enjoyed reading Maria Edgeworth’s novel “Helen”. To me Helen seemed to be a novel about lying. The small, little lies we tell and how destructive even they can be. The heroine of the novel, Helen Stanley, is orphaned and goes to live with her dearest friend, Lady Cecelia Clarendon and her husband. Cecelia is a sweet, charming girl; but she has the habit of telling small seemingly harmless lies, that build up and destroy her relationships and her marriage.
  
  Now I did enjoy the novel, but there seemed to be quite a few people in the book who would never dream of telling a lie, any type of lie at all. Helen, Cecelia’s husband General Clarendon; her mother Lady Davenant; her sister-in-law Miss Clarendon; none of these people would ever tell the smallest white lie. I think it would be very hard to go through life and never lie to anyone about anything. It leaves me wondering how many lies have I told during my marriage? During the week? Or just today? It was definitely worth reading.
  
• 
  Susan

  Miserable. I began this book because I read that Maria Edgeworth was a contemporary of Jane Austin and was exponentially more popular in her time. It is not poorly written but the humorless agony the characters experience goes on for far longer than I can stomach. Helen is the last book Edgeworth wrote and is alledgedly free of moralizing. Instead the characters stop every two pages to deliver long lectures about how to be really racist, or the proper place for women, or how to be horrid to persons not of your class, or any number of other terrible things so the author is relieved of the duty.
  
  Basically, I hated it.
• 
  Victoria (Eve's Alexandria)

  There is much to recommend this, including the invigorating common sense of Edgeworth's writing about women and marriage and honesty. But there is plenty of baggy histrionics to bulk out the paper thin plot over 500 pages and the ending is full on emotional excess.
• 
  Mariam

  Maria Edgeworth was, apparently, a role model of sorts for Jane Austen. It's very clear in "Helen," a story whose title character is a young woman of perfect integrity and maturing judgement. An enjoyable read for lovers of this literature, which I am.
• 
  Lisa Maxwell

  Written in an age during which females found themselves hostage to the whims, gossip and petty scandals of patriarchal Society, Maria Edgeworth's Helen is a morality tale that warns of the folly of naivety. Like Fanny Burney's Evelina, the titular Helen is an orphan, raised by a kindly clergyman and sent into an unfamiliar and dangerous world that preys upon the youthful and innocent. In her naivety, generous and kind Helen is soon ensnared in a web of lies that will leave her reputation in tatters and her heart in shreds. How will she survive the deceitful abandonment of her friends? Will her good name ever be restored? Read the book to find out....
  
  The world into which Helen is thrust is filled with interesting characters: The droll and sarcastic Horace Churchill, who, charmed by Helen's innocence, seeks to open her eyes to Society's darkside. Idealistic do-gooder Granville Beauclerc, who, like Helen, suffers from a surfeit of compassion. Vain and spoiled Lady Cecilia Clarendon, Helen's childhood bestie, who does not really have Helen's best interest at-heart. Lady Davenant, Cecilia's hot-and-cold mama, who is Jiminy Cricket in pearls. And the rigidly moralistic General Clarendon, whose good opinion, once lost, may be gone forever -- or, maybe not.
  
  What I love about Maria Edgeworth: She does an admirable job of entwining plots and sub-plots and sub-sub-plots into an interesting, but not overly complex morality tale. We truly do care about her characters. And she's Regency-era hip and fluent in French buzzwords. What's not to like? If you like Austen and Burney, you'll LOVE Maria Edgeworth. Next on my Classics List: Edgeworth's Belinda.
• 
  Patrick Barry

  Wives and Daughters (1864) by Elizabeth Gaskell and this one (1834) share a common plot; that is some love letters that when written were harmless, but become much more serious at a later date. In Elizabeth's book this is just an issue for a handful of chapters but in this one the entire second half of the book centres around this issue. It is a bit of a silly topic but the book is very much about personalities and how many of those contributed to the events that pan out. The General, while strict, seems to be a decent enough bloke, but it was his "conditions" placed on his prospective wife that was at the route of the issue and her inabiliity to be honest. On top of this rejected lovers/hot-headed lovers, jealous family members, people rising into a level of society in which they are out of place, all contribute to a situation sprialing completly out of control. Above all these players lay Lady Davenant (and in the later stages Miss Clarendon) who could see what was really going one.
  
  Like many of these type of books Helen is a bit too prefect. We never really get to know the love interest that well, he is a decent naive bloke. But to give him his due, his faith never faltered. By no means one of my favourite books from this era, but I did enjoy it.
  
  Something I have learned, gambling must have been a big issue back then, in so many of these books we have seen both men and women destroyed by gambling and this one has just been added to that list.
• 
  Karen

  I wanted to love this book so much. I am really disappointed that I did not enjoy it more.
  
  This is a book of two halves. I can see what Maria Edgeworth was trying to do with the first three hundred pages, as she sets the scene for the lies that Cecilia tells and how the situation builds up and gets out of control, but I found it dull and tedious to read. However, there was something in the characters that made me continue. I did like the remaining two hundred or so pages alot more. When the plot shifts from scene building to drama then the book becomes really quite good. It just takes so long to get there! And she managed to rush the ending! I was not fully satisfied by it.
  
  The two main characters, Helen and Granville Beauclerc are bland but okay. My favourite was Lady Davenant. I think it a real shame that the lying and misunderstandings were resolved only at her deathbed and primarily because she insisted on blaming Cecilia's conduct on how she had brought her up. It seemed lazy plotting to me.
  
  I am glad I read the book but overall, I was disappointed. I have two other books by this author on my shelves (The Absentee and Patronage) so hopefully I will enjoy them more.
• 
  Sarah

  I read this a while ago, for one of my book groups. It was picked by a big Jane Austen fan, as Edgeworth was a contemporary not hers. It made me realise why Jane Austen is still read and enjoyed today yet I had never heard of Maria Edgeworth. But the detail of his guests in big houses had to pay for things themselves was fascinating.
• 
  Sam

  Great fun! Jane Austen-ish but more author intrusion and instruction on morality. Malre characters a bit cardboard, but females good and she build tension very well in second part! It was a good light read while ploughing through Capital!
• 
  Diana

  I enjoyed this, though it did take me a while to get into it. A very interesting storyline about how things can spiral out of control.
• 
  KayW4

  If you've never read any Edgeworth but are keen to give her a go (maybe you read that she was Jane Austen's greatest competitor?) - then Helen is a good place to start! It's a fairly late book in the author's career, which means that she is less didactic, and more concerned with nuanced characterization, than in earlier books like 'Patronage' and 'Belinda'. 'Helen' also contains an extraordinary portrait of an unrepentant (for the most part) career woman, who chose political influence over motherhood. And the love story is rather fun, with a not-quite-perfect hero, and a heroine who, in all her moral perfection, is actually a human being underneath it all.
  My favourite part of the book is how Edgeworth manages to show that even very small lies and omissions can create a habit of deception that can have extraordinarily large consequences. The plot takes it to an extreme, but the idea is real and exceptionally well done.
• 
  Elsa

  I think I went through every agonising emotion that the author intended for the reader. I went through the second half of the book very quickly as I was so unsure how it all would end.
  I found the characters portrayed very well and I believe that they are very relevant to the present day. I thought that the publishing of the love letters is a very similar thing to leaked photos and the malicious use of images in our modern day way of slandering.
  All in all a good book despite the frustration throughout most of it. I like Helen couldn't help forgiving Lady Cecilia for her faults despite everything she did... I like nothing better than an antagonist that you hate and like at the same time.
  I liked it better than Edgeworth's Belinda. I couldn't put it down towards the end.
• 
  Alba Türme

  I was really looking forward to read it but now that I got it from the post office I have to say that the cover is really off-putting and nothing to do with the image I have of Maria Edgeworth (I'm writing my dissertation about her) so, even though I don't like to judge a book by its cover, this time I have to say that this cover gives a wrong impression of this novelist... I'm disappointed with this sentimentalistic image at the front! It has nothing to do with the hidden polemist and proto-feminist Edgeworth I found in her first society novel, Belinda.
• 
  Kirsty

  One which I will probably come back to. I was very much enjoying this - and in my opinion, it is better than Austen - but it is so incredibly long. I think it will be a good idea to read one of Edgeworth's smaller books first to see if I continue to enjoy her style and plot. If I am satisfied, I will embark upon the good ship Helen once more.
• 
  !Tæmbuŝu

  
  KOBOBOOKS
  
  Reviewed by
  The Guardian (3 Jul 2010)
  
• 
  K.

  A few nice tidbits supremely weighed down by almost unbearable tedium. Made it through 63% and just can't take it anymore.
  
  I'm sorry Miss Maria, if you had stuck to the story rather than the social commentary I may have continued on. Lady Davenant ad nauseum.