forgiveness doesn't come with a debt

Mary Balogh's Romantic and Abolitionist Imagination

authorial conditions on an HEA

Initially, one aim of this newsletter was to explore how interpersonal justice is served in historical romance by looking at different authors’ conceptions of punishment and forgiveness. While an HEA is supposed to be a low bar for something counting as a romance, I do think different authors have different demands for what narrative methods they employ to link the existence of an HEA with satisfaction for the reader. And these arcs of harm and repair often go through theories of punishment and justice, linked to questions of the value of retribution or restoration in interpersonal relationships. Though I try to maintain prison abolition politics at the center of my approach to everything, including historical romance, after I wrote my version of this for Lisa Kleypas, I’ve not picked up the specific mode again.

In my piece about Kleypas, I theorized that for a romance to work for her, the house and property have to be fixed, particularly in her interconnected series. There’s an emphasis on the house and the space where harms were done being instrumental in the harms being corrected. Certainly not a new concept in literature, but it is one many of Kleypas’ literary descendants ignore as an avenue of romantic inquiry. Her progeny are more likely to use settings that feel like they have been rolled in on casters for decorative purposes. But for Kleypas, the house is instrumental to the romance being trusted, by the narrative and the characters, and the arc of the house guides the reader through the arc of the romance, particularly across books.

I’ve finally reached saturation of Mary Balogh in my brain. We just released an episode of Reformed Rakes about Balogh’s career and where her books sit in the history of romance, so I’ve been reading a lot of her works. Considering how narrowly Balogh writes (almost exclusively in the Regency, with repetitive plot beats, never too far from an aristocrat) my reactions to Balogh novels are wide. A handful of her novels are at the top of my canon of historical romance¹ and even a few more have made me so angry that I became convinced that I never actually enjoyed this genre at all after I read them.²

One explanation for that range is how Balogh handles theories of punishment, forgiveness, and justice in her romances. What she does when a character does a bad, harmful act that the book and the other characters know³ is harmful.

So what does Mary Balogh use to shepherd her romances, to signal to the reader that the relationship is to be trusted? Unconditional forgiveness, particularly without any sequence of “earning” the forgiveness, be it an apology or actions. In Balogh’s world, an HEA cannot exist until this state of transcendence over a transgression is achieved. Often the answer to why I don’t enjoy one of her books is that this clean slate runs afoul of my own demands for narrative punishment or justice.

Lots of romances involve an apology—something cruel has been done, a miscommunication has happened. Apologies make sense in a genre where most conflict comes inside a relationship. But the extent to which Balogh plots center on someone who has done something terrible owning up to it, or (more frequently) someone who something terrible has been done to saying “I’m forgiving you” exceeds the genre standard.

Some Balogh books deal with forgiveness in a thorny way. I think she is especially successful at writing the emotion of forgiveness when the bad actor has passed away, where forgiveness only ever serves to help the one offering it. But I also think many of her books may approach a model of forgiveness that many bad faith questioners assume prison abolition and restorative justice endorses: the idea that a world without punishment is forgiveness without consequences or restoration. Some Balogh characters forgive first, before an apology or any sort of restoration, or even apologize themselves when the narrative frames them as a victim. She has them turn the other cheek to the extreme.

But even for the narratives that I find unsatisfactory, with the apologies insipid or forgiveness undeserved, Balogh is often writing a world where characters have to imagine creatively a new paradigm of grace and justice, beyond the petty demands of a retributive Regency society. Balogh came up in the genre writing category romances for Signet’s Regency Romance line, in the mode of Georgette Heyer, and her works focus on a society obsessed with arbitrary rules, with exacting societal punishments if the rules are not followed. Often Balogh’s characters are divesting from the stronghold these rigid expectations have on them, instead imagining a world where love and connection is centered over propriety and decorum. The rejection of the Regency world order is often accompanied by reconsiderations of what counts as a transgression and a harm—personal harms are considered by their impact, instead of by their offense to the ton and individuals get to decide how to advocate for their path forward.

Prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba writes in We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: “A world without harm isn’t possible and isn’t what an abolitionist vision purports to achieve. Rather, abolitionist politics and practice contend that disposing of people by locking them away in jails and prisons does nothing significant to prevent, reduce, or transform harm in the aggregate. It rarely, if ever, encourages people to take accountability for their actions. Instead, our adversarial court system discourages people from ever acknowledging, let alone taking responsibility for, the harm they have caused. At the same time, it allows us to avoid our own responsibilities to hold each other accountable, instead delegating it to a third party—one that has been built to hide away social and political failures.”

When asked “what about consequences or accountability?” a prison abolitionist might point out that the system without much accountability is the one we currently occupy. Abolition asks for imagination and experimentation, acknowledging both that the prison-industrial complex as it stands is unsatisfactory for its stated goals, be it rehabilitation or justice for victims, and that it has and will always be used as a government mechanism to police and punish people of color. I find so often the abolition answers to questions about “what do we do instead?” feel unsatisfactory because the person asking them wants non-carceral solutions to satisfy carceral impulses, currently the only thing that is unequivocally satisfied by the criminal punishment system. Prison promises a back end, blanket solution to certain harms, so no proffered abolition-oriented solution will seem to match that scale because this framework avoids one-size-fits-all punishments.

There are a couple of romance novels that I would argue are themselves abolitionist texts: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale and To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney, most notably. Balogh never really reaches those rhetorical heights—she’s not even particularly concerned with prison or crime as a plot element. But I think she writes in a way that is curious about the imagination and experimentation that a new way forward demands. Her arcs of justice and punishment, primarily in the context of interpersonal relationships, represent a huge range of imagined possibilities outside of incarceration or even typical romance villain “comeuppances.” but I think she can be read through an abolition lens, critiqued and understood as interested in something paramount to a new vision of justice (accountability and forgiveness), whether she always succeeds on this vector or not. So that is what I am going to try and do it with one of my favorite of her works, Someone to Hold (2017).

a meme lovingly made by my co-host, Chels, when I was still on the fence about my affetion for Balogh

harms done, harms undone

One mode of Balogh that unequivocally works for me is when she revisits a morally suspect character from an earlier book and gives them a love story. Dozens of Goodreads reviews of Someone to Hold mention how annoyed the readers were by Camille Westcott in Someone to Love or how surprised they were by her turn as the main character. The inciting incident in the first book of the Westcott series is a revelation that Camille’s father, the late Earl of Riverdale, was already married with a daughter when he married Camille’s mother. Camille and her siblings are disinherited as illegitimate and Anna Snow, the secret daughter from the Earl’s first marriage and heroine of Someone to Love, inherits the money and earns the right to be “Lady Anastasia,” whereas Camille becomes “Miss Westcott.”

Out of all the Westcotts, Camille takes the news the hardest and lashes out at Anna every time they are together in the book. At the first meeting Camille calls her a “conniving, scheming creature” and a “vulgar, ruthless, fortune-hunting bastard.” Anna is a sweetly bland heroine (I find the book itself dreadfully dull), but Camille assumes malicious intent from her at every turn. Other characters are able to see that the bad actor here is the father who lied to his family and abandoned his first daughter. His sister, the dowager Duchess of Netherby, thinks “Oh how dare he die when he did and escape retribution?,” but Camille repeatedly fixates on Anna’s role in the upheaval of her family.

At the beginning of the book, Camille is engaged, but her fiancé, Lord Uxbury, leaves her after the bigamy revelation, dashing her last hope of returning to the life that she thought was her divine right as the legitimate daughter of a titled man. After the broken engagement, Camille leaves London with her mother and sister. Anna responds by attempting to reconnect with Camille through the restitution of funds from her new inheritance, but Camille’s biased vision of the harm is more expansive than monetary value, and she refuses any restitution.

Still, well before any headway is made in Camille and Anna’s relationship, Anna gives Lord Uxbury a dressing down at her come out ball, after he insults Camille to her face.⁴ Anna’s public insult, encouraged by Avery, the Duke of Netherby, leads to Uxbury calling the Duke out for a duel, where he continues to insult Camille. Many people witness the duel, and Anna reports the context and results to her best friend in Bath, Joel Cunningham. But since Camille refuses to interact with her former society, even if some will accept her, she has no idea that Anna and the Duke are defending her to this extent. At the end of the novel, Anna and the Duke are married, but with Anna choosing to Camille and her sister space to figure out their new lives, though she has plans to divide her inheritance into four parts, for herself and her three half-siblings.

Camille’s story in Someone to Hold starts with an extreme social asceticism, punishing herself for her father’s behavior by acting the way that Lady Camille Westcott thought all non-aristocratic people, especially illegitimate children, should act: without grandiose notions, outside of polite society, with deep shame about their origin. Her judgmental behaviors we see in Someone to Love have totally turned inward by the time we get to her story. Her understanding of the world and what kind of a life is available to her is colored by both a deeply classist outlook (reflected and confirmed by how people, including her former fiancé, treat her now that she is illegitimate) and a self-consciousness that was there before the inciting incident, but has been exacerbated by her untethering from the only position in the world she has ever had.

Camille has become nearly a hermit, but she has resolved to start going back out into the world. She could take advantage of some fringes of society’s pity, but she thinks of how she treated Anna when she believed that her half-sister was illegitimate and earnestly believes that she ought to be treated the same way. She takes the teaching position at the orphanage school in Bath occupied by Anna before the revelation in Someone to Love. There’s a Single White Female aspect to what Camille is seeking out, almost pushing the bruise made by the catalyst of what she sees as her downfall and an unhealthy fixation on Anna’s life.

But Camille cannot fully articulate to herself why she is so interested in seeing where Anna grew up and worked. She thinks “The orphanage had acted like a magnet ever since she came here, drawing her much against her will” and when she hears the position is opening up, she is “puzzled and alarmed” when she impulsively hints that she might be interested in taking it. At this opening of her story, Camille still feels a deep-seated hatred for Anna, though she acknowledges now that Anna did nothing to cause the wound she feels so acutely. She knows her feelings are irrational, but she cannot stop feeling them. Taking Anna’s place seems to be an attempt to process those feelings externally, by experiencing sympathy of place, since Camille cannot muster sympathy of emotion.

Camille’s grandmother and sister certainly do not understand her compulsion to remake her life based on the only image of a working class woman that she is vaguely aware of. Her sister sees the behavior as a type of ascetic punishment, but Camille sees herself almost in sensory seeking terms: to adapt to the new world, she must experience it, just like a baby reaching out and grasping at things. Nothing in her previous disposition indicates that Camille would be a good or warm teacher, but she doesn’t know herself as Miss Camille Westcott at all. She’s opening herself to imagining a new world of possibilities and preparing herself to be someone who will accept both her new lot in life and her new half-sister.

Her new position and attempts at acclimating to her new reality does not mean that Camille suddenly stops being the judgmental bully that readers saw in Someone to Love. And Joel Cunningham, the art teacher and Anna’s former colleague (and her childhood sweetheart), is predisposed to see Camille in this context, based on her behavior to Anna during the ordeal. He is effectively in the position of the reader, remembering Camille’s past bad acts in the worst possible light, reading every action as indicative of her superior attitude and thoughtless cruelty.

But Joel is tasked with painting Camille’s portrait by her grandmother and part of his process is getting to “know” his subjects. Camille insists that “knowing” another person is impossible—an attitude spurred by her father and fiancé’s betrayals, but when Joel asks her to have tea with him, she pointedly responds: “If this is your way of gathering information about me so that you can paint a convincing portrait of me, Mr. Cunningham, I would warn you that I will not make it easy for you. But if you do get to know me, please let me know what you discover. I have no idea who I am.” In their conversations, Joel has made sly remarks suggesting that Camille, raised an aristocrat, is incapable of empathy, either for her orphan students or for Anna. This is first moment where he realizes he might be failing to extend empathy to Camille, who now exists in a similar position as he: a working-class illegitimate scion of the aristocracy.

During this tea, Camille finally hears about Anna and Avery’s actions against Lord Uxbury. Camille does not believe the reportage of either the insult or the duel at first. Camille’s vision of her ex-fiancé is centered on him being a “perfect gentleman,” so she frames his rejection of her as aligned with the “right” behavior, assuming that he was correct to treat her that way because he would never do anything out of line from what is demanded by society. The revelation of his sordid insults from Joel breaks down Camille’s perception of Lord Uxbury as “perfect,” allowing her to be angered by her mistreatment for the first time, as well as laugh at his expense and begin to think of herself as aligned with Anna.

But later when she is alone thinking about Lord Uxbury’s insults, she weeps. Less so for being insulted, but for realizing that the world she once occupied, whose rules she aimed to follow so closely “built not upon rock, but upon sand,” since Uxbury seemed to be the perfect match to her propriety, but turned out to be as cruel and as unfeeling as her father. The shaking up of her life triggers Camille to begin to view everything more neutrally, which allows her to be kinder to herself and encourage Joel to do the same, when he is presented with information about his birth family.

The shattering of the backdrop of her entire ethos spurs Camille to remake herself in a new image and to reevaluate her reactions to outside information. She explores her relationship with Joel, who she had assumed hated her for her behavior toward Anna, begins to think of herself as an educator instead of interloper at the school where she works, and reconsiders her father’s behavior that has spurred the upheaval of her life.

Anne, Avery, and the other Westcotts visit Bath and Camille has the chance to begin to repair a relationship with Anna. At first, she regresses to her most prim, off-putting self, quietly receiving the news of Anna’s pregnancy, unsure of how to react. Avery walks her home from this conversation and reveals the pride Anna felt when she learned that Camille was making her way in the world by teaching in Anna’s old position. Camille also sees her mother model a type of forgiveness when she accepts Anna’s offer of restoring the portion of the inheritance that represented her dowry when she married the late Earl. When the former countess tells Camille this, she says “Your father left behind something of far greater value than a large fortune. He sired four fine children.” Camille had assumed that her mother was equally bitter by the presence of Anna, so she asks how her mother can be so forgiving of the situation and she responds: “Because the alternative will only harm me.”

Camille’s next meeting with Anna represents a step forward. As they talk amongst the shops in Bath, she promises to stop insisting that Anna is her “half-sister” instead of “sister” and they discuss their shared bitterness over a childhood they might have had together, had their father been honest. Camille accepts Anna’s offer of a quarter of the fortune their father left, finally seeing it not as charity, but as a token of a way forward for the family.

Camille’s life has had a marked lack of self-reflection, so she begins to consider why she hews so closely to the Regency society rules that have failed to protect her from the fallout of her father’s actions. One of her pupils, Winifred, is a precocious little tattletale, whose piety and religiosity alienates the other children and annoys the adults at the orphanage, including Camille. But Camille sees much of herself in the child, with the extreme effort to follow rules to earn love, or an approximation of love from those around her.

Before Joel and Camille agree to marry, he hypothetically considers adopting Sarah, a sweet orphaned baby that has taken to Camille, with the implication that he and Camille would be married in this future. Camille suggests that they also consider adopting Winifred. Joel is surprised by the suggestion, but Camille explains: “She is righteous and pious and neat and judgmental. I recognize myself in her, Joel, to the point of pain. She wants desperately to be loved and believes love must be earned with good behavior. She does not understand that her efforts are pushing love away rather than gathering it in.”

When Camille tells Winifred that she and Joel are considering adopting her, if Winifred consents, Winifred responds with self-aggrieved piety: “I always try to be good and to learn my lessons and be tidy and help others and say my prayers, but other people do not always like me...I am not worthy of such an honor, Miss Westcott.” But Camille patiently explains to the child: “Love does not have to be earned… Love is not the reward for good behavior. Love just is. I want you to know that if you choose to be my daughter and Mr. Cunningham’s, we will love you no matter what. You would not have to feel you must be on your best behavior every moment.”

While embracing Winifred, Camille thinks of her father, who seems to make love conditional on good behavior, and then in response to good behavior, still didn’t seem to love her, and concludes “he had been the loser in his inability to love or accept love, [but] she forgave him for all the pain he had caused her and loved him anyway.”

growing bigger, not smaller

By the end of Someone to Hold, Camille is not a completely different person than she was at the beginning of Someone to Love. She never metaphorically lays prostrate in front of Anna, asking for forgiveness. That speech might satisfy a vindicative reader, looking for Camille to be embarrassed or ashamed of how she spoke to Anna, but would be useless to Anna, who wants a sister to have a relationship with. Camille’s behavior of accepting the offer of money and reaching out in conversation is a more effective form of accountability.

Camille’s father cannot be held accountable, since as his sister points out, he died and escaped any sort of “retribution.” But Camille, as she begins to think of her new life first not as a punishment, but more neutrally, and then eventually as a blessing, realizes that holding onto the hate and shame begat by her father’s crime only leads to her injuring herself and those members of her family offering to love her. Even his cruelty in his lack of consideration for her as a child cannot be punished, so she must take measures to redirect that pain into understanding for those around her and not have it sour into cruelty of her own.

This redirection mostly happens on a personal level, but the metaphor for abolition imagination best comes from considering that Camille is choosing to operate outside the punishing system that Regency society demands. She has grown up in a world with exact rules where transgressions are punished severely, without consideration of extenuating circumstances and Camille was an extreme advocate for that system, as seen first in how she treats Anna when she believes that she is an upstart and how she sees fit to punish herself when she realizes she is illegitimate.

Through her relationship with Joel and her work as a teacher, she begins to see a wider range of possibilities for consequences of her, and her father’s, behavior. Her work as a teacher, in the role that Anna occupied, is not an ascetic punishment, but an opportunity for growth, within herself and toward understanding her sister. Her father’s harm better prepares her for empathy toward Joel as he learns more about his birth family. The results are not severed from the bad acts, but Camille learns to seek expansive realities, both in repairing harms she has enacted and in forgiving those done to her.

Like I said in my introduction, I don’t want to overstate the presence of abolitionist thinking in Balogh’s work. I think many of her books fail at the tightrope walk between accountability without cruelty and unsatisfactory attempts to turn the other cheek. However, when she pulls off the prioritization of forgiveness as a method to move forward, or a mode of communication and connection, she is at her very best and I see narratively the expansive feelings that I get when I think about abolition politically.

1. Someone to Hold, Slightly Scandalous, Slightly Dangerous, Only Enchanting, The Proposal, The Secret Mistress, Dancing with Clara, Simply Perfect, A Precious Jewel

2. Simply Love, Slightly Sinful, The Arrangement, The Escape, Someone to Love, Someone to Trust

3. Distinct from any number of romances where bad/harmful acts happen that annoy me, but doesn’t disturb the characters in the slightest.

4. “I hope never to see you again. You are a man I despise, and I am only glad my sister was fortunate enough to avoid a marriage that would surely have brought her nothing but misery even if the truth of her birth had never been discovered. Archer House is not my home, but this ball is in my honor. I would ask you to leave.”