| Chapter 1: | The Early Years |
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The not-so-beautiful protagonist meets and marries a wounded and disfigured soldier (a man she had loved secretly for a long time) who had just been jilted by his heartless fiancée; she cares tenderly for him, and he returns her devotion with gratitude. In the end, they enjoy a long and happy life together. During the course of this narrative, Maria ceases to be the principal character of her life story, although her presence is felt because she remains the narrator and controller of the text. Maria Graham did not—or perhaps could not, being a married woman at the time she composed her memoir—provide a personal romantic interest in her autobiography, and the inclusion of this story-within-a-story appears to fill that void. Apart from their flawed physicality, both protagonists perform their expected roles in this type of narrative: the wounded hero and the faithful maiden who has loved him in silence and is finally rewarded. The narrative represents the culmination of Victorian novels, the happy marriage of the protagonists. What is more, it provides a positive outlook on human nature and on human destiny that counterbalances the pervading sombre tone of the whole.
The second significant narrative has a wider scope because it involves many characters—all the pupils and teachers of the school, besides most of the inhabitants of the village where the school was located—but more importantly, because it deals with a social problem that perhaps only Dickens treated later with similar frankness and compassion. It is intriguing to study Maria Graham’s memoir and to find so many motifs of later nineteenth-century novels and also of the novel of sensibility in her text, such as the orphaned child, the lack of affection translated into rebellion, or the love story with a happy ending. Linked to these motifs are devices she uses well, such as the inclusion of suspense into the narrative, the partial perception of events through the eyes of the unaware young narrator, or the forces of nature enhancing dramatic scenes, to name a few. In this second narrative Maria Graham also uses powerful images of destitution and neglect.
According to the narrator of the memoir, there was nobody to care for the poor of the village. One severe winter morning, the mother of a large family whose husband was a farm labourer died on her way to milk their master’s cows. ‘The fact was that being underfed and overworked, she had sat down to rest a moment, the cold had seized her, and she had been frozen to death before assistance arrived’ (45).