Content area
Full Text
by Catherine Kerrison*
ON snowy days, when time lay heavily on her hands, an aging Elizabeth Jaquelin Ambler Brent Carrington found herself drawn to the little cabinet that held treasured old manuscripts and letters. Reading them "frequently beguiled a miserable day" and prompted memories of how the presence of elegant French officers had relieved the chill of another Yorktown winter, that of 1780-81, and rendered that little town so "gay and delightful." Indeed, the officers had been "devoted to the inhabitants." Sparing no effort in their attentions to the people of York, they devised magnificent entertainments; "at least," Carrington added, with some asperity, "they appeared so to persons unused to french style."' Her disenchantment was warranted; one of her own friends, Rachel Warrington, had succumbed to the charms of those very appearances. This capitulation, from which ensued an unwanted pregnancy and an illegitimate son, cost Warrington her reputation and any chance of a favorable marriage.
Decades after the French officers'' brief but passionate flirtation with Yorktown and its environs, Eliza Carrington began (although never completed) a novel to set down lessons learned from Warrington's experience. She drew on a years-long correspondence with Mildred Smith, the dearest friend of her girlhood, to mull over the meaning of Warrington's seduction. Her fictionalized meditation encompassed larger questions about the very nature of "the Sex" and its strengths and weaknesses.
It is revealing that the adult Eliza attempted to frame her reflections on her adolescence as a novel. As a girl, the young Betsey (she does not appear as "Eliza" until her later letters) had witnessed a real-life drama that suggested the plot of the newest type of advice literature, the sentimental novel. The advice literature circulating in Virginia in the latter half of the eighteenth century was, very broadly speaking, of two types: the older, more straightforward instructions of the seventeenth century in which modest submissiveness to male authority was the predominant motif, and the newer literature of short stories and novels in which heroines taught clearly discernible lessons to readers about the need to rely on their own wits, rather than male protection, to preserve their virtue. The correspondence of Betsey Ambler and Mildred Smith, in addition to Ambler's unfinished novel, shows how two young Virginia women...