Maria Graham: A Literary Biography By Regina Akel

This excerpt also resembles the recapitulations that were common in Victorian novels, especially those of Dickens, where the narration stops to take account of what has already happened, in the light of moral observations that follow the mainstream discourses of the time. What is different in her exposition of events is that she displays a profound self-knowledge that allows her to plead her case effectively and to position herself as the injured party. Reflecting on her relations’ lack of awareness of her feelings, she says,

Very seldom in her work does Maria Graham resort to pathos as a device to awaken pity in the reader, either for herself or for others. It is, nevertheless, a device of the nineteenth-century novel exemplified best by Dickens in Britain and Harriet Beecher Stowe or Louisa May Allcott in the United States. She manages this trope well in her memoir by applying restraint, and the saddest points of her story are merely suggested. Her plea for understanding ends with a simple reference to a well-known fable without further comments, and this method achieves results because it evokes the scene and the narrator’s pain with a single powerful comparison:

To those who assumed that I could not feel, how was it possible that I could show gratitude for that protection that was only given to me in common with others, and receiving no caresses, while they were lavished on those around me, is it wonderful that my young heart was shut up, and that I abstained from attempting any of those kindly actions that were natural to children who were kindly treated? On one occasion, and I believe it was the very last in which I volunteered a caress, I was told to go away, for my imitation of ------------ only put people in mind of the ass and the lap-dog.¹⁰ (30–31)