One of the distinct delights of great literature is that regardless of a work’s author, age, or original language readers can find an illuminating and recognizable picture of the human condition. Open the dialogues of Plato, a medieval epic, or the early modern essays of Montaigne, and it’s all there: the same questions, conflicts, and emotions that color our lives today, even if presented in unfamiliar contexts or arcane diction. Humanity might progress technologically and scientifically, but much of the human experience stays the same. When has love, for instance, ever ceased to summon up boundless joys and terrorizing agonies in the hearts of its captives?
The characters in Elizabeth Griffith’s engrossing 1769 novel, The Delicate Distress, contend with these powerful forces of love and all its attendant consequences, both good or bad. The novel’s epistolary form allows the characters to unburden themselves to their confidantes as they seek advice, assistance, and validation in the course of life’s upheavals.
Born in 1727, Griffith wrote three novels in her diverse artistic career. Her first attempt at the genre, The Delicate Distress, counteracts the sometimes burdensome nature of this literary form with a crescendo of tensions that arise in the lives of a distinct cast of personalities. Various manifestations of love — married love, past love, unattainable love — is the common denominator in the interweaving stories, which centers around the newlywed couple of Lord and Lady Woodville.
The novel opens with a letter from Lady Emily Woodville to her older and married sister, Lady Straffon. The pure and kind-hearted Emily opines on her new life as a wife. Ever the dutiful and caring spouse, she wants only to please. At first, things are sublime: her life is “blessed to the utmost extent of her most romantic wishes” (7). It’s deeply distressing, then, when she senses that her husband is preoccupied and his state unsettled. She exclaims the horrors of her heart to her sister: “[T]ell me how I have offended him! how lost that heart, which formed my utmost bliss!” (142).
There is indeed something on her husband’s mind: a young and beautiful marchioness, now widowed, who once turned down his advances in favor of a much older, and wealthier, man. The flame he felt for the marchioness has not been quenched. His desires burn as strong as ever.
In the same way that Emily writes to her sister for relief and edification, so Lord Woodville finds an irreplaceable outlet in Lord Seymour, a friend privy to Woodville’s infatuations for the marchioness. Burdened by his own recent travails of love, Seymour implores Woodville not to attend an event in York, where his love object will be in attendance — a reasonable enough piece of advice.
But being under the thrall of romantic passion, reason doesn’t reign supreme. It almost goes without saying that Woodville decides to go to York, thinking he can resist the allures of his past love. He can’t. Before long, his renewed acquaintance with the marchioness leads him down a path of agonizing ruminations
As Lord Woodville grapples with his unruly passions and Lady Woodville seeks the counsel of her sister, the dilemmas of other characters also play out. Lord Seymour seeks to regain his beloved Charlotte. Her complicated story includes everything from stony-hearted parents to the tranquil refuge of a monastery.
Griffith has a tendency to weigh down her novel with bloated backstories, which can lead to a frustrating dispersal of one’s attention. Along with Charlotte’s ordeal, the travails of Lady Harriet Hanbury (Lord Woodville’s cousin) and a character named Lady Somerville consume sizable chunks of the novel. While the first two are closely entwined to the novel’s central characters — and therefore pertinent, even if lengthy and sometimes convoluted — the inclusion of the latter feels like an unnecessary demand on the reader’s concentration.
Indeed, The Delicate Distress has enough stories as it is, each of which artfully contrasts with the others, while all of them together amplify the tangled, complicated, and unpredictable energies of love. But what’s just as impressive is Griffith’s ability to construct characters that, more often than not, feel “real.” These are human beings grappling with difficult and complex emotions — ones that make up the contours of any relationships today. Then, as now, love is never straightforward or untainted by the follies of its adherents
Some of the characters — often the men — make considerable mistakes as they execute rash decisions or let passions trample over prudence. Likewise, the duplicity and inconstancy of men is a common theme in the novel. Captain Barnard, the love interest of Harriet, is callous and concealing on numerous occasions, leading to a broken heart for her and regretful actions by him. Stories likes this one lead Lady Woodville to pronounce to her sister a seemingly permanent fact of life: “The willow grows on purpose for our sex; and were it to be watered, only by the tears drawn from beauteous eyes, by the perfidy of men, it would need no other moisture” (28).
Wild and chaotic drama sometimes unfolds from actions of this sort, but not always. The central narrative, that of Lord and Lady Woodville, is less remarkable in terms of external events than any of the narratives. Lord Woodville makes no overseas trips, engages in no physical altercations, and is no debauchee. He struggles immensely to reign in a former — and still burning — passion. He’s flawed, but not vile. It’s a mark of Griffith’s suburb storytelling that she can unravel his psychology in a way that doesn’t feel sensational or over the top, but rather entirely true to life.
______
Griffith, Elizabeth. The Delicate Distress. Edited by Cynthia Booth Ricciardi and Susan Staves. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
Spectatio 