A Memoir of Passion: The Recess

A Memoir of Passion: The Recess

The sentimental novel evoked an emotionally moving experience from readers who could relate to characters and situations. When Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess was published in 1783, its popularity soared. Known for its feeling of suspense, dread, and terror, Sophia Lee brought about a new style of gothic literature while still incorporating the traditional aspects of the Gothic genre such as castles, abbeys, and the supernatural. A narrative Gothic tale in epistolary form, The Recess, literalizes all the conventions of the sentimental novel in which the primary fictional correspondences are exchanged between female characters, and in which the reader is inscribed, typically, as a young woman similar in age and situation to the heroine (Alliston 4).

By incorporating romance and history, Lee initiates what is described as perhaps the most fully developed historical female gothic novel of its time (Wright 20). A pioneer of the genre, Sophia Lee, is not inhibited by the expectations and limitations that the form imposed on many of its later manipulators (Isaac 202). The Recess relates the fictional yet emotional tale of two sisters, Matilda and Ellinor, the daughters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. While imprisoned, Mary and Norfolk are secretly married to evade the wrath of Elizabeth. When twin daughters are born, the threat to Queen Elizabeth’s throne is undeniable. For their safety, Matilda and Ellinor are surreptitiously raised in a subterranean Recess by a woman named Mrs. Marlowe. She assumes the role of mother until the girl’s fixation on getting out of the Recess becomes persistent. When portraits of their parents are found, it is then that their true lineage is disclosed and our story begins.

The heroine’s search for her history thus becomes the search for her maternal history that is only found in the absence of the mother. Thus, the correspondence becomes the inheritance passed on to the children which ironically becomes the only evidence left of Matilda and Ellinor’s true identity. When they are told of their identity, they realize the impossibility of claiming their right to their intended inheritance. With this knowledge, Lee lets the reader know that the girls are at the age of maturity and their journey outside the maternal confines must begin. Matilda states with excitement:

But what new ideas; what amazing feelings did her narration give birth to! The impulses of nature taught us to treasure every word she uttered; for what in the history of our parents could be indifferent? Never did our solitude appear so amiable – “the Court of Elizabeth” – Oh my lamented father … Could she who oppressed her equal … be capable of alluring two hearts, untainted by that courtly politeness, which sanctifies the errors of a soverign, and terms her very vices noble weaknesses? (Lee 35)

Not only are the children becoming women, but the knowledge of their parents encourages new thoughts and ideas. This begins the evolution of Matilda and Ellinor into young adults. The Recess not only signifies the title of Lee’s book but possesses a symbolic significance as well. The Recess emulates the womb. A subterranean home enclosed with rooms and secret passage ways, one can view the Recess as the womb where Matilda and Ellinor were nurtured and cared for throughout their pubescent life. Many attempts to return to the Recess after the women depart are embarked on but never with the success anticipated. When Matilda and Ellinor decide to venture off into the world, it marks the symbolization of their passage from innocence to knowledge.

In the novel, Lee criticizes not the female movement from innocence to knowledge, but the original attempt to hide the young girls away and deny them worldly education, experience, or knowledge (Isaac 205). It is through this lack of education, however, that none of the women presented throughout the narrative are able to escape the confines of norms set upon them. By the end of the novel, Matilda’s daughter has also followed in her mother’s footsteps. Lee’s protagonists seem doomed to their fate because of their lack of knowledge and education. Mrs. Marlowe serves as their educator and friend and is held with much sympathy, but she does not teach them the way of the world. She keeps the girls sheltered of much knowledge because she too has been sheltered. The notion of motherless women plays a crucial role in the lack of education. Though Matilda and Ellinor are raised to believe they have a mother, like most other heroine’s they are motherless. The mother's substitute has provided the heroine with the one thing that she is allowed to possess in her own right: virtue, a moral value that she is to hold as a substitute for the missing patrimony (Alliston 83). Yet, when