42 pages • 1 hour read
Maria EdgeworthBelinda
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1801A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-10 Summary
Belinda Portman, living in the care of her aunt, Selina Stanhope, reaches age 17. By social convention, she is ready now to be married. Mrs. Stanhope, accomplished in the art of “rising in the world” (3), is familiar with the strategies for successful matchmaking. She has already secured suitable matches for her other six nieces. Mrs. Stanhope determines Belinda will relocate to London to live with family friends, Lord and Lady Delacour, in their mansion in Berkeley Square. In London, Belinda can take advantage of the Delacours’ prominent social standing—the couple is known for throwing lavish, stylish parties—and ultimately find a suitable husband.
Initially Belinda is impressed by the Delacours, their well-appointed home, and their lavish lifestyle. Lady Delacour takes a particular interest in Belinda, and the young girl is deeply appreciative of the care Lady Delacour takes to introduce her to the ways of London’s high society. Gradually, however, Belinda comes to see how much of Lady Delacour’s behavior masks a profound sadness. The Delacours have little real money but nevertheless spend lavishly on a lifestyle designed to impress their social circle. Lord Delacour is a distant and unloving man, a reprobate who drinks to excess and largely ignores his wife. For her part, Lady Delacour entertains Clarence Hervey, a much younger man on the rise who sees his friendship with Lady Delacour as critical to his social climbing. Belinda finds out that early on in their marriage the Delacours suffered the stillbirth of their first child; a second child died while still an infant. Both Lord and Lady Delacour are estranged from their only surviving child, now in her teens, a daughter named Helena who was sent to boarding school and now resides with Lord Delacour’s sister, Margaret Delacour, who lives at the estate of Lord Henry and Lady Anne Percival, friends of the Delacours, at Oakly-park.
When Belinda first meets Clarence Hervey, she cannot help but be attracted to him despite his arrogance and rudeness. Belinda understands that Hervey’s relationship with Lady Delacour puts any friendship between them out of the question. Then, at a masquerade ball when Belinda agrees to swap costumes with Lady Delacour, Hervey, in conversation with her, thinking he is talking with Lady Delacour, makes disparaging remarks about Belinda’s aunt as a soulless and opportunistic matchmaker.
After the ball, Lady Delacour, in a moment of emotional honesty, reveals to Belinda that she is in fact dying. The following day, in an extended confession, Lady Delacour confides that when she was Belinda’s age she fell under the spell of none other than Henry Percival, powerful and macho, but she married the much weaker Lord Delacour who sought her hand largely because of her family’s fortune. She was sure then that she would have no trouble “governing him” (21). She sees that now as a “fatal mistake” (21). Years into an unhappy marriage, Lady Delacour tells Belinda that her husband lives a dissipate life, drinking to excess and gambling away large sums in disreputable company while she languishes alone and unhappy. She tells Belinda that some years earlier, in her boredom and depression, she innocently flirted with a friend of her husband’s, a colonel named Lawless, but her husband, thinking the affair was serious, killed Lawless in a duel. Lady Delacour now lives with the guilt over her involvement. Later, in a petty argument with the wife of a powerful acquaintance over a political campaign involving the woman’s candidate husband, Lady Delacour actually challenged the woman to a duel, something unheard of for women (indeed, the two had to meet dressed like men). But as she primed the pistol, it misfired. Her own bullet pierced her breast. She refused to seek any medical help, fearing the shame of a scandal. Now some months later she is certain the untreated wound has festered and become cancerous. Belinda meets Lady Delacour’s confession with a mixture of “astonishment, pity, admiration, and contempt” (39). She promises not to leave Lady Delacour until her death.
Meanwhile, Hervey, who now understands the blunder he made at the masquerade, asks Lady Delacour to arrange a meeting with Belinda so he might apologize. When they meet, Hervey is intrigued by Belinda’s quiet beauty and subtle charm. Belinda struggles with her heart. She is drawn to Hervey but resists her inclination, thinking he is interested in pursuing an illicit liaison with the very married Lady Delacour.
The following night, on a dare from two of his chums, Hervey recklessly tries to swim across the Serpentine River, a large artificial lake in the heart of London that has only recently opened. Hervey, who cannot swim, flounders. He is saved not by his chums, who run, but by Lord Henry Percival who happens to be passing by. Lord Percival invites Hervey to dinner. Hervey meets the Percivals (including young Helena) and finds them to be a bright, happy, perfectly mannered, and engaging family. When Hervey meets with Belinda the next day, the two agree to work together to help Lady Delacour reunite with Helena before what they both believe is her fast-approaching death.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Belinda Portman is the title character. She dominates these opening chapters. A contemporary reader expects that as the title character, Belinda will be both recognizably human and the focus of considerable emotional and psychological evolution. Traditionally, the primary character undergoes a series of traumatic events, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. By the end of the novel the protagonist reveals how those experiences have changed them. The protagonist grows and, as the reader follows their growth, they become the sympathetic focus of the reading experience. The reader comes to care about the title character.
Those assumptions define the novel one generation after Maria Edgeworth. For late Restoration readers, engaging with an extended story about a made-up person doing made-up things is not rewarded by feelings of intimacy and sympathy (such imaginative excesses were deemed suspicious, even the measure of a diseased mind). Rather, the novel delivered a tidy, clean lesson. Readers of Belinda were not expected to be entertained or to care about the title character. They were expected to complete the narrative and then live a better moral and appropriate life. The primary character here does not change. The reader does.
In these first chapters, Belinda is presented as a fait accompli. She simply is. She never shares her backstory, how she came to live with her aunt, her family, her education, her interests. The reader has no psychological profile that might generate sympathy. Belinda is a formidable presence from the start, a young woman of discernment, sound judgment, careful articulation, and moral rectitude. How she came to be that by age 17, the reader never knows. Belinda is dispatched to London to live among the wealthy elite on a mission to find a suitable husband, a socially embraced convention for women of the era. The modern reader then expects a series of events, some funny, some not, in which Belinda will evolve and develop her character. As a moral fable, however, it is not Belinda who changes but rather Belinda who changes others.
She discerns within the first eight pages that Lady Delacour is not what she seems to be. With remarkable acumen, Belinda understands that Lady Delacour, despite the lavish trappings and her vast social circle, despite her clever turn of phrase and her obvious education, is a misfit, lonely, sad, desperate, and unloved. Belinda immediately sets about redeeming Lady Delacour’s character, acting less as a character and more as a moral guide. What is at issue in Belinda’s involvement with Lady Delacour’s moral redemption is Belinda’s decidedly modern idea that a woman is more than the union she makes, that a woman is more than a wife or mother, that a woman has the right to be emotionally complex and even contradictory. Like the reader, Lady Delacour upon first meeting Belinda immediately feels that here is a formidable presence that can be trusted. She confides in Belinda not only about her two dead children but also her estrangement from her surviving daughter. She tells Belinda what she has yet to tell her own husband, that she was wounded in a duel over his name and reputation, and that she believes she is dying from a festering wound she inflicted on herself. It is a lot for Belinda to take in—she is only 17 and has just met this woman—but with her moral rectitude and sound judgment, Belinda understands that Lady Delacour needs to make her peace with her family. She becomes the instrument of that redemption.
The reader sees the same quick perception adjustment when Belinda first meets Hervey. Her heart, her inner sensibility, is immediately moved by Hervey’s presence and physical appearance. But within 10 pages, Belinda discerns his character flaws—his need to please others, his selfishness, his ego, his crass determination to succeed in London society—and cautions her heart not to give in to such a flawed man. Much as she does with Lady Delacour, Belinda acts as moral guide to bring Hervey in line with her own unerring sense of moral rectitude and right living. The incident at the lake underscores how foolish Hervey is. Although it borders on comic, the outcome could easily have been tragic. The reader sees that Hervey has more to gain from his friendship with Belinda than Belinda has to gain by a friendship with him. The man needs the woman more than the woman needs the man. That dynamic runs counter to the glut of romances that flooded the reading market in Edgeworth’s time. In agreeing to league with Hervey to help Lady Delacour, Belinda also begins the quiet work of redeeming Hervey.
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By Maria Edgeworth
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