The French Connection in Frances Burney and Mary Shelley

Kristy Carpenter summarizes one play about the Emigration written by an actual exile as follows: the heroine’s father, a French noble, is secretly married to an English woman. When she dies, he marries again, while the child is from the first marriage entrusted to the dead wife’s brother, who puts her in a convent. During the revolution the child emigrates, comes to London, and after she succeeds in asserting her true identity, she claims her fortune and marries her English cousin. Carpenter explains that “this was a very typical plot” (Refugees 151). Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac conforms to significant contours of this outline; while de Sevrac is married only once, it is clear that he consummates his relationship with Adelaide and intends to marry her before his father thwarts him.1 Adelaide subsequently has a baby girl whose paternity is an open question: is she de Sevrac’s, or does she belong to the count who rapes Adelaide? De Sevrac later marries an Englishwoman, while Adelaide is herself placed in a convent from which she never emerges. In this plot, it is the legitimate daughter, Sabina, who marries the English St. Clair, and who claims her fortune (on her British mother’s side) at the novel’s conclusion.