Mary Brunton
Novelist | 1766-1845
As represented by her husband Alexander in the memoir he published after her death, the life of Mary Brunton (1778-1818) life resembled those of the protagonists of her novels Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814) not only in the romantic circumstances surrounding her marriage, but also in her quest for self-improvement. Young Mary Balfour’s parents opposed her marriage to Brunton, who had been a tutor in their household on the island of Burray, in the Orkneys; but she eloped with Brunton in a rowboat, escaping her solitary girlhood to become a wife of the eventual minister of Greyfriars Kirk and Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Edinburgh. Alexander Brunton justified the posthumous publication of his wife’s correspondence and miscellaneous writings on the grounds that her reflections on her efforts at self-improvement might be “useful to…her fellow creatures.” If Alexander hoped his wife’s biography might prove instructive and inspiring to readers, Mary Brunton had similar hopes for her fiction. Like so many women writers of her time, Brunton declared fiction’s didactic potential, its capacity to improve readers, as her reason for publishing her work.
Although Mary and Alexander Brunton had no children of their own, they cared for two East Indian wards, the illegitimate children of one of Alexander’s friends. The couple visited the North of England in 1809 and London in 1812, the only times that Mary travelled outside of Scotland. Brunton died in childbirth at the age of 39, leaving a novel, Emmeline, unfinished.
Several years before Jane Austen’s famous defense of novels appeared in Northanger Abbey (1819), Mary Brunton wrote in a letter to her friend, “Why should an epic or a tragedy hold such an exalted place in composition, while a novel is almost a nickname for a book? Does not a novel admit of as noble sentiment — as lively description — as natural character — as perfect unity of action — and a moral as irresistible as either of them? I protest, I think — a fiction containing a just representation of human beings and of their actions — a connected, interesting, and probable story, conducting to a useful and impressive moral lesson — might be one of the greatest efforts of human genius.”
Bibliography
Sharon Alker, “The Business of Romance: Mary Brunton and the Virtue of Commerce,” European Romantic Review 13.2 (2002), pp. 199-205.
Carol Anderson and Aileen M. Riddell, “The Other Great Unknowns: Women Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century,” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 179-95.
Andrew Monnickendam, The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone (New York: Palgrave 2013).
Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).