Clara Howard

Clara Howard was the second-to-last novel published by Charles Brockden Brown. First published in 1801, the novel is both an epistolary novel and a novel of manners which diverges, alongside the novel Jane Talbot from earlier novels by Brown which were more intense and radical Gothic fiction.[1]

For the educator and missionary, see Clara Ann Howard.

Critic Paul Worthington calls these novels a natural progression of Brown's quest for a perfect novel form, despite their divergence in themes.[1] While other critics where extremely negative about this change.

Form and genre

The novel, as an epistolary novel, largely includes letters between Clara and her lover Philip.[1] Critic Marin Samual Vilas, writing in 1904, noted that the epistolary form creates the greatest weaknesses of the novel.[2]

Themes

The novel focuses on how Clara's individuality becomes subsumed by social norms and expectations.[1] In this context, "Love, like any other concern, must submit to reason", and even reason.[1]

Reception

Writing in 1904, critic and biographer Martin Samual Vilas called the novel "exceedly simple", full of "sickly sentamentalism", and evidence that "Experience in works of fiction did not add to Brown's ability in writing them."[2]

gollark: Also, it probably wouldn't inherit whatever magic slot-splitting behavior you have now.
gollark: 1. I'm lazy (though yes, admittedly, you probably are)2. It'd be slower to manually find the slot(s) with free space.
gollark: How about a table of slots moved into?
gollark: Can it? Huh.
gollark: Specific use case: Wyvern internally uses a quick method to search its index for free space - `#items < inventories[name].size()` on each inventory - manually searching slots would be slow and kind of annoying, so currently the index for a chest is just entirely updated whenever an item is inserted, which is slow.

References
  1. Witherington, Paul (1974-01-01). "Brockden Brown's Other Novels: Clara Howard and Jane Talbot". Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 29 (3): 257–272. doi:10.2307/2933169. JSTOR 2933169.
  2. Martin Samuel Vilas (1904). Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction. Free Press association. pp. 40–43.

Further reading


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