Elaine Forman Crane

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Elaine Forman Crane | Abigail Adams, Gender Politics, and The History of Emily Montague: A Postscript | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Abigail Adams, Gender Politics, and The History of Emily Montague: A Postscript

ABIGAIL Adams never ceases to amaze. At times obligingly candid, often consciously opaque, Adams at her best is the mistress of eighteenth-century literary allusions. She taunts her audience with unattributed quotations and implicitly dares the reader to discover her sources. A voracious reader, Adams banked the language of poetry, politics, and propaganda to spend at her pleasure. She borrowed couplets from Alexander Pope, forged ideas from Lord Halifax, and stole from Antoine Thomas, only to bury these treasures within the lines of her future correspondence, including her famous March 31, 1776, "Remember the Ladies" letter to husband John Adams.	1
Adams's clever manipulation of words and phrases in that early spring letter to her husband might never have attracted attention if three of the same lines had not reappeared in Nancy Shippen Livingston's journal entry seven years later on May 15, 1783. For reasons that are still unclear, both women were taken by the words "such of us as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master, for the more tender and endearing one of friend." It is reasonably certain that Livingston did not have access to Adams's letter; it is equally improbable that the two women independently created the same chain of words. As it turns out, a feminist novel captured Adams's attention and her quill somewhere between 1769 and 1776. The sentence comes from The History of Emily Montague, written by English author Frances Brooke (1724–89).¹	2
The History of Emily Montague is set in Canada just after the English conquest of the French colony during the Seven Years' War. Brooke, already a well-known author and translator, followed her chaplain husband to North America and took up residence there from 1763 to 1768. She penned the novel during her stay in Quebec and appears to have sent the manuscript to London where it was published, possibly in serial form, in 1766 and then as a single volume in 1769. Within a year French editions made their way to bookstores in Paris and Amsterdam.²	3
This epistolary novel is simply a 1760s travelogue and love story in which two tender souls are eventually united and virtue is rewarded. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl are distracted by financial challenges, an unsuitable suitor, and an aging mother. They finally marry and live, one presumes, happily ever after. The novel's descriptions of Canada's breathtaking natural wonders, the social behavior of the newly arrived upper-class English settlers, and the attributes of the French and native populations are its salvation. If, according to Brooke, the English had good reason to superimpose their religion and customs on Canada's inhabitants, the Indians were nonetheless worthy of admiration, which was not true of the French. Though the French population could claim some attractive women, for the most part the French were an indolent bunch. From a historical perspective, Brooke's description of the relationship between the English and French just after the Treaty of Paris is an appealing overview of how a conquering power engages and interacts with an existing population.	4
Furthermore, though the novel, "like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along," it is historically pertinent for its feminist implications, many of which must have drawn Adams to its pages.³ The young women who dominate the novel are independent actors. They reject any marriage not based on free choice, insisting that partners should share interests as well as love, sensitivity as well as tenderness. They advocate divorce to end an unhappy marriage. The heroines, Emily Montague and Arabella Fermor, are outspoken women who prove by their actions that female passivity and submissiveness are not desirable characteristics any more than they are prerequisites for happiness. Yet the ideas that Adams and Livingston found so compelling were not spoken by any of the female characters but rather by a man: the novel's hero, Edward Rivers. Indeed Rivers is everything John Adams was not.	. . .

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