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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Valerie," Frederick Marryat presents a richly woven narrative that explores the intricate dynamics of love, duty, and societal expectations in early 19th-century England. The novel's literary style combines vivid characterization with evocative descriptions, transporting readers to a world where personal desires often clash with moral imperatives. With its blend of romantic tension and moral dilemmas, Marryat's work is situated within the emerging genre of the Victorian novel, reflecting the period's evolving attitudes towards gender and love, as well as the complexities of navigating one's own desires amidst rigid societal norms. Frederick Marryat, an accomplished sailor and an early proponent of the sea adventure genre, drew on his own life experiences to inform his writing. Having spent years at sea and facing the challenges of leadership and loyalty, Marryat's insights into human behavior and social constructs are vividly illustrated in this compelling narrative. His diverse experiences, both nautical and literary, provided a rich backdrop that enabled him to capture the emotional landscapes of his characters with sympathetic and nuanced strokes. "Valerie" stands as a testament to Marryat's skillful storytelling and keen observation of human relationships. Readers who cherish intricate character development and exploration of societal constraints will find this novel to be a rewarding journey. It is highly recommended for those interested in the evolution of the novel as a form and in the rich tapestry of 19th-century literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Valerie
Table of Contents
Introduction
A heart’s true compass is tested when private conviction collides with the claims of reputation and duty. Valerie by Frederick Marryat introduces readers to a nineteenth-century world where intimate choices reverberate in public spaces, and where character must negotiate custom, chance, and consequence. Known for shaping modern nautical fiction, Marryat here turns the reader’s attention to the intricacies of social life and personal resolve, drawing on his practiced sense of structure and pace. The result is a novel that balances feeling with judgment, offering an experience at once engaging and reflective, attentive to the ways individuals steer through pressures they neither chose nor control.
Situated within the broad current of mid-nineteenth-century British fiction, Valerie belongs to the period in which Marryat was a widely read novelist and an influential storyteller. While his name is most closely associated with sea adventures, this work engages a different register, favoring social observation, ethical testing, and psychological contour. Readers encounter the customs, manners, and mores of the era without the need for specialized historical knowledge, and the book’s clear prose invites steady immersion. The publication context aligns with a moment in British letters when realism, sentiment, and moral argument coexisted, allowing Marryat to shape a narrative that is accessible yet quietly exacting.
The premise is deliberately intimate: the story centers on its eponymous heroine, whose life unfolds through decisive meetings, contested loyalties, and moments when judgment—her own and others’—shifts the course of events. Without relying on grand spectacle, the novel builds its stakes from the consequences of choice, the burden of appearances, and the fragile currencies of trust and discretion. From early scenes that place Valerie on the threshold of new circumstances, the plot advances through situations that ask what integrity requires and what it costs. The trajectory is clear enough to orient the reader, yet restrained, preserving discovery while establishing the emotional terms of the voyage ahead.
Marryat’s narrative voice is lucid, measured, and efficient, favoring movement without haste. He orchestrates turning points with an assured hand, allowing atmosphere and implication to do as much work as overt declaration. Dialogue and description are kept in disciplined balance, creating a tone that is serious without austerity, sympathetic without surrendering judgment. The style offers a steady accumulation of pressure rather than sudden shocks, and the chapters tend to resolve with a sense of pause that invites reflection. Beneath this composure lies a moral curiosity that asks how people become responsible to one another, and how they live with the answers they give.
Themes gather around identity and agency: how a person defines herself when social scripts are rigid and scrutiny is relentless; how courage can take the form of patience, and fidelity the form of candor. The novel probes the economies of reputation, the costs of secrecy, and the uneven distribution of power within courtship, family, and friendship. It treats love not as spectacle but as a sequence of decisions with public consequences, and it attends to the fine grain of conscience—how small accommodations can accrete, and how truth, once invoked, demands consistency. Through Valerie’s trials, the story explores the possibility of mercy alongside the necessity of principle.
For contemporary readers, Valerie matters as a record of questions that persist: What do we owe our own sense of right, and what do we owe our community; where is compromise prudence, and where is it betrayal? It will appeal to those who enjoy nineteenth-century fiction for its clarity and moral stakes, and to those interested in viewing Marryat beyond his celebrated sea narratives. The book’s emphasis on social pressure, gendered expectation, and the ethics of disclosure makes it a resonant companion to discussions about autonomy and accountability today, offering an historical lens that sharpens rather than distances the issues.
What the novel ultimately offers is an intimate, steadily building experience: a clear line of action anchored to a reflective center, rendered in prose that privileges transparency over ornament. Readers can expect a study of character under stress, moments of quiet suspense, and an atmosphere where choices carry weight long after they are made. As an entry point into Marryat’s range, Valerie widens the compass of his reputation, showing how his command of plot and moral inquiry can operate as persuasively on land as at sea. It is a story designed to engage both sentiment and judgment, and to leave them in conversation.
Synopsis
Valerie, presented as an autobiography, opens with the narrator explaining why she records her life. She situates herself in provincial France, the daughter of a respected family with modest claims to gentility. Her early years are shaped by careful education, religious instruction, and an emphasis on propriety. She observes adult conversations at a distance, learning about honor, duty, and the delicate necessities of reputation. The tone is reflective rather than dramatic, establishing a personal voice while introducing the social conventions that will govern her choices. Attention to household routine and the expectations placed upon young women grounds the narrative before events accelerate.
The account soon widens from home to town and city, as Valerie describes visits that expose her to fashion, politics, and the first stirrings of change. Suitors and alliances enter family discussions, revealing the tension between inclination and arrangement. A relative’s illness and the administration of property push her toward responsibilities she does not fully welcome. Through a network of kin, tutors, and trusted servants, she learns to assess character and motive. The period’s unease surfaces in rumors and pamphlets, while domestic routines persist. Valerie remains cautious, aware that her security depends on prudence, yet increasingly conscious that circumstances beyond her control are gathering.
Public disorder intrudes on private life. Valerie’s family faces surveillance, financial pressure, and the possibility of confiscation. Friends vanish into exile or silence, and familiar institutions change face. Guided by practical advisers, she adopts a quieter manner, limits appearances, and cultivates resilience. A planned connection is deferred, and correspondence becomes guarded. She gives a measured account of departures and separations, noting practical details—papers, funds, tokens—that secure identity when names grow perilous. The narrative’s focus tightens to the logistics of safety, the weight of discretion, and the calculus of risk, marking a shift from youthful observation to deliberate management of danger.
Valerie recounts episodes of movement and concealment, alternating between urban anonymity and rural shelter. Encounters at checkpoints, offices, and inns emphasize how authority can be arbitrary yet predictable if studied patiently. She describes the fear of prisons and tribunals without dwelling on spectacle, highlighting instead the routines by which people endure. A timely kindness from an unexpected quarter alters her prospects, allowing her to preserve essential documents and a thread of communication. The episode functions as an early turning point: she recognizes that calculation must be tempered by trust, and that survival may depend on reading character as closely as reading official notices.
A period of relative calm leads to change of country. Valerie resettles for a time among strangers, where speech, customs, and expectations differ from those of her youth. She learns to apply her accomplishments practically—teaching, correspondence, careful economy—while observing the commerce and conversation of a new society. Hosts and patrons provide protection, yet dependence raises questions of dignity and gratitude. A courteous friendship deepens into a possible attachment, but distance and obligation complicate any conclusion. The narrative remains restrained, keeping emphasis on adaptation, industrious routine, and the quiet negotiations by which a displaced person maintains honor without courting attention.
News from home reopens decisions she thought closed. Legal rights and inheritances, long deferred, must be asserted through petitions, proofs, and patient appearances. Valerie returns to a landscape altered by policy and memory, where old neighbors calculate advantage under new laws. She works with advisers to reconstruct lineage, property, and promise, only to discover ambiguities that unsettle claims. A rival party advances a competing case, and testimony invites scrutiny of her past choices. The conflict is procedural rather than sensational, emphasizing papers, dates, and attestations. It becomes a crucible in which she tests the balance between pride, prudence, and the wish to belong.
Travel and communication remain hazardous, and the narrative records careful itineraries—coast roads, river crossings, and intervals determined by permits and weather. Valerie accepts help from individuals she cannot fully evaluate, and the risk of misjudgment becomes a theme. A narrow escape and a misdirected confidence mark the story’s second major turn, tightening the web of obligation that surrounds her. Without unveiling crucial outcomes, she notes how a delayed letter, an unguarded remark, and a name overheard cascade into consequences. The pace quickens briefly, then steadies, returning to the measured tone that has characterized her approach to uncertainty.
As broader affairs settle toward uneasy peace, Valerie’s private disputes also near decision. Reconciliations are attempted where possible; where not, propriety supplies a boundary and a form. The essential questions—what claim she can sustain, what attachment she should accept, and what future suits her conscience—are brought forward with quiet clarity. The resolution, not disclosed in detail, rests on a consistent preference for integrity over ambition and on a practical reading of what the time will bear. The story’s emphasis remains on endurance, mutual consideration, and the maintenance of character when perfect justice and perfect happiness cannot both be had.
Valerie closes her narrative without flourish, addressing readers who may face trials different in form but similar in pressure. She suggests that patience, accurate judgment, and measured kindness are the tools by which ordinary lives traverse turbulent periods. Her reflections underline limits placed on women by law and custom, while affirming capacities that those limits cannot erase. She neither defends nor condemns the age, preferring to record how people adapt within it. The overall message is steady: fortune shifts, policies change, attachments are tested, yet a life guided by honor and intelligent caution can find a durable, if modest, contentment.
Historical Context
Frederick Marryat’s Valerie is set largely against the shifting Franco-British world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, moving between urban centers such as Paris and London and the coastal zones that connected them. The narrative atmosphere reflects the aftershocks of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic ascendancy, and the Bourbon Restoration, when passports, police surveillance, and censorship shaped daily life. Cross-Channel travel, émigré networks, and the legal status of women—especially under the Napoleonic Civil Code—form a persistent backdrop. The time-frame implicitly spans from the 1790s into the 1830s, capturing the instability of regimes and the negotiation of identity and property across borders.
The French Revolution (1789–1799) overthrew the Ancien Régime, beginning with the Estates-General’s transformation into the National Assembly and the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Key turns included the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), the king’s flight and return (1791), the proclamation of the Republic (1792), and the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) under the Committee of Public Safety. Confiscations of émigré property, denunciations, and the guillotine remade society and family fortunes. Valerie invokes this legacy in its characters’ vulnerability to arbitrary authority and informers, its attention to clandestine movement and altered identities, and its sensitivity to the precarious standing of those tied to pre-revolutionary privilege.
After the Directory faltered, Napoleon’s coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) inaugurated the Consulate and, in 1804, the Empire. The Concordat with the Papacy (1801) reorganized religious life, and the Code Civil (1804) standardized private law, reinforcing paternal authority and constraining married women’s legal agency and property rights. Joseph Fouché’s ministry developed a pervasive system of surveillance, permits, and passports. Valerie reflects this regulatory climate in episodes that hinge on permissions, papers, and the unequal power relations embedded in family and marital law. The novel’s conflicts over autonomy and inheritance mirror the Code’s ramifications for women and for families disrupted by political upheaval.
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) shaped European life through conscription, blockade, and constant mobilization. Trafalgar (21 October 1805) destroyed French-Spanish naval hopes, while the Continental System (Berlin Decree, 1806; Milan Decree, 1807) sought to strangle British commerce, prompting smuggling and clandestine trade along the Channel and North Sea. Campaigns from Austerlitz (1805) to Leipzig (1813) culminated in the Hundred Days and Waterloo (18 June 1815). Marryat, a Royal Navy officer during this era, imparts authenticity to scenes of coastal vigilance, privateering, and arrest risks in contested waters. Valerie’s cross-Channel passages and references to embargoed goods evoke wartime economies and the ambiguous morality of survival amid blockade.
The Peninsular War (1808–1814) drew Britain into Iberia under Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), where guerrilla warfare and scorched-earth tactics destabilized Napoleon’s western flank. The catastrophic invasion of Russia (1812) drained French manpower and morale, leading to the Allied entry into Paris (1814). These fronts fractured households across France through levies and absentee men. Valerie alludes to the social vacuum left by conscription and the insecurity of correspondence from distant theaters. The novel’s emphasis on absence, rumor, and the fragility of engagements mirrors wartime disruptions, as news from Spain, Russia, or the Rhine arrives slowly, reshaping reputations, inheritances, and the prospects of those tethered to officers and officials.
The Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) returned Louis XVIII and, later, Charles X to power, followed by the Allied occupation of Paris (1815–1818) and the White Terror against Bonapartists. The 1825 indemnity law (the milliard des émigrés) compensated returning nobles, reigniting disputes over confiscated lands and dowries. Mounting unrest climaxed in the July Ordinances (25 July 1830) suspending press freedom and dissolving the Chamber, triggering the Trois Glorieuses (27–29 July) and the July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe. Valerie echoes these oscillations as characters navigate censored print, shifting loyalties, and contested property. The novel’s property and status anxieties align with Restoration indemnities and the volatile politics of legitimacy.
Across the Channel, Britain grappled with postwar dislocation and reform. The Peterloo Massacre (16 August 1819) exposed tensions over representation; the Six Acts (1819) tightened public order; Catholic Emancipation passed in 1829; and the Reform Act (1832) reshaped Parliament. Public health crises, including the 1831–1832 cholera pandemic, altered urban governance. The Metropolitan Police were founded in 1829, professionalizing surveillance. London hosted French émigrés in districts such as Soho and Marylebone, fostering transnational salons and patronage webs. Valerie’s English interludes stage contrasts between British procedural order and continental volatility, using émigré circles, passport scrutiny, and philanthropic networks to dramatize the social negotiation of status and security.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the intimate costs of authoritarian governance, war mobilization, and legal inequality. By foregrounding a woman’s perspective, Valerie registers the civil disabilities imposed by the Code Civil, especially regarding consent, property, and custody. It scrutinizes surveillance—informers, permits, censorship—as instruments shaping private fate, and it highlights how indemnities and restorations create new injustices while remedying old ones. Cross-Channel settings underscore how national myths of stability or liberty can mask exclusion, class barriers, and xenophobia. In tracing exile, dispossession, and bureaucratic coercion, the narrative challenges triumphalist histories and calls for humane, accountable rule.
