English novelist Anne Ker (Phillips) was born in 1766 and published several works of popular fiction between the years of 1799 and 1817. [1] She was a commercial writer whose desire to sell aligns her with many other female writers of the time. Lacking the literary innovation or coherent morality to be praised by the reviewers or remembered today, the works of authors like Ker represent fiction as it both existed in and influenced its society, subsequently offering valuable insights in to that context. Ker is of additional biographical interest: she seems to have been a determined and outspoken character whose bold opinions on fiction contributed to contemporary debates about women's writing and reading. As becomes apparent through Ker’s correspondence with with the Royal Literary Fund, her life also exemplifies some of the hardships experienced by female authors of the Romantic period.

     Anne Ker was the daughter of John Phillips, a native of Essex who trained as a builder before becoming a noteworthy surveyor of canals. [2] Phillips documented and disseminated his practical work in a series of popular reference books, beginning in the 1790s with Crosby's Builder's New Price Book (1790) and A Treatise on Inland Navigation (1792), and ending with A General History of Inland Navigation, Foreign and Domestic (1809). Phillips appears to have been a man deeply committed to his career and guided by an interest in the progressive potential of the construction of canals that affected his daughter in a number of ways. Ker would claim late in her life that her father's devotion to his work led to a series of expensive endeavours by which the family was left financially embarrassed. In addition, Phillips's perseverance, his visible and vocal participation in society, and his use of print as a means by which to publicise his beliefs, would have a powerful influence on his daughter's character and the way in which she would come to use writing.

     By the time of her father's death on 1 December 1813, Anne Ker was thirty-seven and an experienced author. She had been assisted in her fictional output by the connections of the family into which she had married, which was headed by John Ker, the third Duke of Roxburgh, an avid book-collector associated with a number of Whig aristocrats. [3] Of this family and its circle of acquaintance, certain individuals seem to have been especially prominent in influencing Anne Ker's writing, such as Lady Jerningham, wife of the poet and dramatist Lord Jerningham, the Princess of Wales, Lady Mary Ker, and Lady Gordon, who lived bitterly estranged from her husband. [4] These were some of the women upon whom Ker depended for subscription to her first and fourth novels during the early and vigorously productive years of her writing life from 1799 to 1804. In total, she wrote and published six novels: The Heiress di Montalde; or, the Castle of Bezanto: A Novel (1799), Adeline St Julian; or, the Midnight Hour, a Novel (1800), Emmeline; or, the Happy Discovery, a Novel (1801), The Mysterious Count; or, Montville Castle. A Romance (1803), Modem Faults, a Novel, Founded on Facts (1804), and Edric, the Forester: Or, the Mysteries of the Haunted Chamber. An Historical Romance (1817).

     Ker experimented with a number of the genres circulating in the fertile and changing fictional landscape of the early 1800s. The first two of Ker's publications are recognisably Gothic in style and content. The Heiress di Montalde (1799) charts the fate of a persecuted heroine amidst a setting of Mediterranean landscapes, dilapidated castles, mysterious villains, and other tropes associated with the Gothic genre prevalent during the 1790s. The Heiress di Montalde is described in the Critical Review as another 'imitation in Mrs Radcliffe's manner', suggesting its alignment with the style of Gothic commonly authored by women. Owing to its use of suspense, and to its delineation of a supernatural occurrence that eventually finds a rational explanation, this novel may certainly be classed alongside the predominantly female-authored 'terror' branch of the Gothic popularised by Ann Radcliffe. In contrast, Adeline St Julian appears a year later and contains a great deal more violence than its predecessor: scenes of physical torture are conveyed whilst the perceived cruelty and irrationality of the Roman Catholic Church is strongly criticised. These inclusions align Adeline more with the male Gothic tradition associated with the evocation of horror rather than terror, exemplified in particular by M. G. Lewis's anti-Catholic and contemporaneously notorious novel, The Monk (1796). A number of parallels may be drawn between these two texts in order to illustrate their generic proximity. In Adeline, Elinor's pregnancy breaches the rules of the Church and leads to her horrific imprisonment at the hands of the offended nuns in a tiny cell. The father of her child dies unjustly and, though she herself is rescued, Elinor's remaining years are unhappy ones. The events of this subsidiary story echo those occurring in the inset story of Agnes in The Monk, and the descriptions used by Lewis and Ker-most notably with regard to the way in which Agnes and Elinor are discovered in an emaciated and deranged state-are also strikingly similar.

     Ker's third novel Emmeline is set in England and marks the writer's departure in 1801 from the Gothic genre. Ker's turn away from such tales of excess and transgression reflects the wider trend in the wake of the Revolutionary decade towards more conservative, domestic fiction that depicted situations and characters more likely to exist in the young female reader's own life and surroundings. In similarity with Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), one of the novels most important in popularising this style, Emmeline places a virtuous orphan girl under the care of a less than moral guardian. Like Belinda, Emmeline must negotiate the trials of the fashionable world, such as the false friendship of a coquette and the lecherous advances of a libertine, before her virtue and strength are rewarded. With Modern Faults in 1804, Ker tries her hand at the yet more serious didactic genre that was an expanding facet of the contemporary literary landscape. This tale, in which a mistreated heroine endures her misfortunes with religious faith and strength, in many ways anticipates the moral and Evangelical fictions that would come to prominence in the 1810s with the publications of Hannah More and Mary Brunton. Edric the Eorester (1817), Ker's only work to appear in three volumes, was published over a decade after her last novel and contains a striking mixture of all of the genres previously used by Ker, being a combination of romance, Gothic, and didacticism. Importantly this novel is set in the time of William the Conqueror, and represents Ker's only attempt at the historical style of fiction that was increasingly popular in 1810s.

     In keeping with her traversal of generic boundaries, Ker's novels are stylistically various too, making use of a number of distinct narrative techniques. The Heiress di Montalde, for example, is a retrospective account in the first person that also contains a layering of narrative histories recounted in the voices of other characters. Modem Faults, on the other hand, is a largely epistolary novel, whilst the remaining four texts use an omniscient narrator. This tendency towards fictional pastiche exhibits Ker's desire to take advantage of the plural state of the contemporary literary market, and in this way points towards her leading and most significant characteristic as a writer: her commercialism. Ker did not stand out for her use of a particular style, her artistic greatness, or her moral messages. Rather, like the majority of women novelists of her time, she wrote cheap and, in many ways, formulaic fiction. Owing to this normative status, Ker represents something of a gauge of what was habitually circulated and received amongst the readers of the Romantic period: a plurality of popular and changing fictional styles. Interestingly, a closer inspection of Ker's fiction reveals that the lack of adherence to any strict style, characteristic of such artistically or morally unremarkable writers as herself, seems simultaneously to have lent their novels a looseness of composition that enabled a surprising degree of moral ambiguity.

     In many ways, Ker's texts are admissible spaces in which some fairly taboo subjects, such as that of the clandestine or unconventional marriage, are discussed. In The Heiress di Montalde, a secret marriage occurs between Sebastian and Adelaide that gains the narrator's, though not the characters' parents', approval. In the same novel the fact that Count di la Rofa is married, admittedly without his knowledge, to two women at once is glossed over as if unimportant. Adeline St Julian also sanctions the clandestine marriage and ensuing pregnancy of a woman to a member of the clergy. Like marriage, identity too is not stable in Ker's novels. The manifold instances of disguise and cross-dressing occurring throughout Ker's writing embody an attitude towards social characteristics which is at least liberal and engaged, if not radical and instructive. In The Heiress di Montalde, for example, Count Albani dresses as a woman in order to elicit a private interview with Victoria with a view to her seduction. Victoria, however, is actually a man who has for some time been masquerading as a woman. Similarly Correlia, in The Mysterious Count, disguises herself as a priest in order to rescue Albert from a prison.

     The representation of servants throughout Ker's oeuvre may be seen to culminate in a quite radical discourse on social class. A trope of much Gothic fiction sees serving-people identified by a foolish superstition, which, owing to some contrivance of plot, is corrected by their social superiors. Though in one instance Ker represents servants in this customary way, she may frequently be found to portray the lower classes as more rational and moral than their wealthier counterparts. The heroine of Emmeline delivers a bold, 'pretty lecture' espousing this notion when she states that 'virtue is not confined to people of rank' (II, 268). Emmeline is not alone amongst Ker's female characters for her independent and vocal nature. Rather, a number of Ker's heroines are involved in industry and commerce, and many live in a family or even a community devoid of men. Anne Ker's novels also explicitly thematise subjects to which those few of her contemporaries eminent for their literary value or consistently moral purpose make only euphemistic reference. For example Matilda in The Mysterious Count is open and remorseless with regard to her sexual promiscuity both before and after her marriage, whilst in Modern Faults Rosalie discusses the social ill of prostitution at length. What is perhaps most significant about these ambiguities and seeming non-conformities is the fact that they are present in otherwise unremarkable, typical texts. Ker's amalgamation of genres, themes, and styles substantiates the notion that her goal as a writer was popular appeal and commercial success. Her novels may therefore be taken to exemplify the kind written by the majority of female authors at this time. Lacking the artistic merit or coherent morality to be celebrated by the reviewers or remembered today, these were in fact the novels by which the genre would, by the average reader, have been recognised. The content of Ker's fiction reveals, then, that in a standard encounter with the novel the reader would have been presented with a degree of moral flexibility and a range of possible represented worlds.

     In addition to reflecting the fictional context of which she was a part, Ker's novels are of considerable biographical import. In particular, the mode of transmission dominating Ker's oeuvre reveals something of this writer's lifestyle and character. The first point to note is that Ker lacked a consistent publisher for her fictions. One implication of this is that her career was somewhat unstable and precarious, and would have led Ker to adopt a certain inflexibility of character. In addition, the fact that she had to deal with a number of publishers rather than with a single concern would have meant that Ker, through her writing, occupied an independent and visible position in society. To clarify, a number of female authors of these years wrote consistently for large publishing houses such as the Minerva Press. Such publishers provided almost total mediation between the author and the public sphere, taking control of the presentation and dissemination of her novels and, in so doing, make the writer invisible. [5] Conversely Ker alternated between a number of publishers and printers, and so was able to use the preliminary space, normally governed by the publisher, to make direct addresses to, and to engage with, her readership. The nature of Ker's presence in the text's preliminaries, or more expressly the uses to which she put this space, reveals a controversial instatement in the world of print. Her preliminaries disclose a relationship between Ker and her contemporary reviewers indicative of this woman's significant contribution to the wider Romantic-era struggle regarding the contested status of the female-authored novel.

     Despite the fact that the novel was a considerable and largely female-authored genre during the years spanned by Ker's career, the male establishment of the reviewers held the authority to publicly name a text as either worthy or poor. [6] Of the novels in circulation, very few received the praise of the reviewers, and these tended to be works of an expressly conservative or religious inclination. Subsequently, the majority of novels-in other words the novel as most readers would have known it-were denied an identity concordant with their popularity. The politics of this situation are clear: the power wielded by the critics was the power of definition, the power to impose and to police a formulation of worthy, readable literature. Ker's novels were of the very kind despised by the reviewers, who certainly saw her as one of the mass of contemporary writers, 'another wretched imitat[or]' of current trends, as the New London Review's piece on The Heiress di Montlade puts it. [7] The power relation which the reviewers' participation in novelistic discourse aimed to uphold is certainly discernible in their attitude towards Ker. Patronising criticisms belittling her technical skill and competence as a writer are directed at Ker at every stage of her career. The New London Review's account of The Heiress di Montalde cites in particular Ker's use of language and 'confused' arrangement of plot as points for disapproval, whilst the reviewer of Adeline in the Anti-Jacobin Review advises Ker to 'peruse Dilworth, Dyche, Fenning, or some other of our minor grammarians'. Correspondingly, the reviewer of Modem Faults in the Critical Review says very little about the novel that is not an interpretation of how attractive or not Ker appears to be in her frontispiece portrait. The implication of this very common declaration of women's inferior writing ability is that 'our' grammarians, deserving of the authority which writing can confer, belong to the male establishment, with women writers being on foreign territory. The indication is that in the mainstream, dominant public discourse of which the reviews were a part, women writers' identities were prescribed to them by the male discourse within which they were marginalised.

     The deeper fear felt by the critics, however, one suspects, and belied by their vitriolic tone, is that the fictions of Ker, and those of the multitude of female novelists with which she is aligned, in some way eluded and so threatened the male power to define asserted in the comments above. Plagiarism, a want of realism, the lack of a coherent overview, and the absence of a distinct moral message, are amongst the main criticisms of Ker. In these respects, the tendency which the critics name either immoral or 'bad' art is clearly the tendency to combine popular styles and values. The Anti-Jacobin Review's version of Adeline makes this explicit when it refers to Ker's intertextuality and ambiguous message as 'monstrous', a term suggesting an excess which cannot be incorporated by the mainstream terminology. As there is nothing intrinsically base about such pastiche as a way of writing, the reason behind the reviewers' attempts to silence generically mixed texts can be seen to lie in the capacity of such works for independent self-definition. The role of the reviewers was to assert and to maintain the gendered power relations of society in which definitions are generated from the male discourse. The threat of novels such as Ker's would seem to be that they could exist and flourish outside the framework of the male reviewers and the masculine perspective.

     The preliminaries constitute the space revealing the degree to which the author accepts and defers to the male standards. Consequently, Ker's prefatory material is decisive. Many prefaces addressed by women writers of Ker's era exhibit a deference to the opinions of the critics. Correspondingly many publishers encouraged their authors to write anonymously and to refrain from subscription, as the use of a full name on the title page and an open desire to sell were considered indecorous for a woman in this society. In her preliminaries, however, Anne Ker is both scathing and dismissive of the critics with whom many similarly situated authors sought to ingratiate themselves. As we have seen, Ker's first two novels were disparaged by the reviewers. Yet, rather than attempting to compensate for the negative impression created by these works, Ker's remarks in the preface to Emmeline, her third novel, exhibit a decided disregard the male-defined conventions of female authorship. In the 'Dedication to Lady Jerningham' (I, iii-iv), her sponsor, Ker aligns her fiction with the mass of other novels which have 'in general' met with a 'favorable reception' and so are, despite the critics' view, worthy. [8] This inflation of the importance of the general, mainly female, public, continues in the subsequent address ‘To the Public' (I, v-viii). Here, Ker names the critics 'devouring watchmen' and derides the principles of the Anti-Jacobin Review as a 'well known shame'. She also argues that the critics are corrupt, being open to having their 'mouths crammed with a bribe'. She closes by criticising the gender bias that results in fiction known to be 'guided by the hand of a female' being certain to receive a negative review.

     More important than the distinct boldness of this attack on the critics, though, is Ker's simultaneous exclusion of them. By describing Emmeline as this 'wonderful, absurd, improbable, romantic, something which I have written', Ker is mocking the Anti-Jacobin's quibbling over the terms by which fiction ought to be identified. This mockery implies the inapplicability of the male critic's yardstick of values to the realm of the female-controlled novel, and in this way undermines the validity of their presence in the novel. Indeed, in her 'Address to the Public', Ker states that she writes 'in conformity to the pleasure of the times. It is to my patronizers, and to the generous public I appeal, and not to those contemptuous open-mouthed devouring critics'. The important people from whom to seek approval in the sphere of the production and consumption of the novel, then, are those providing the funding: the female sponsor and the female readership. Indeed, Ker's gesture of refusing to address either the ‘Dedication’ or ‘To the Public’ to the critics to whom she refers powerfully expresses bypassing and exclusion of them from the definition of the novel. Throughout her writing career, Ker refuses to either solicit the approval of the critic or to express acquiescence to his definitions. The prefatory space reveals that Ker's principal goal was to sell. The fact that two of her novels contain full subscription lists in the preliminaries, that two contain advertisements for subsequent works, and that all list their preceding works, would have given further impetus to the impression made on the reader that the novels they were reading were commodities. A final and telling point to note in the context of Ker's preliminaries is that the opening of Edric the Forester contains an unusual poem, entitled 'A Ker-ish Trick', by Ker's husband John Ker. Perhaps aiming to elicit sympathy from the reader, this account of the family's misfortunes reveals the ease with which Ker, in contrast to contemporary views on decorum, was prepared to expose her private life. When considered together, Ker's preliminaries reveal her espousal of a theory of the novel as a commercial enterprise, creating a female space of amusement distinct from the male critics' view of worthy literature, that problematised the broader male social monopoly on definitions.

     With the brightest and most prolific period of her writing career over, Ker's life altered greatly. Throughout her later years she suffered from financial hardships and debilitating illnesses to which her several appeals to the Royal Literary Fund, consisting in a correspondence of six applications over fourteen months, testify. [9] In the first of her pleas, dated 21 August 1820, Ker's complaint is that she is 'in want of bread to exist' due to undergoing 'unforeseen accidents in business' and 'that dreadful complaint the gout'. She goes on to state that her 'embarrassments and distress cannot be sufficiently explained by letter', but nonetheless appeals to 'the feeling hearts of the Gentlemen of this Benevolent Fund'. This representation of her dire circumstances earns Ker the payment of £5 for which, on 24 August 1820, she sends a letter of gratitude and a complimentary copy of her most recently published novel, Edric the Forester (1817). On 25 November 1820 a similar application is made by Ker: here, we learn of her intention to take up an offer of paid employment in the New Year, with the need to buy the clothes necessary for this position providing the main reason for the present request. The rejection of this entreaty, on the grounds that it comes too soon after her initial application, resulted, Ker would claim, in her having been unable to accept the previously mentioned teaching post. This provokes a further application on 2 January 1821. At this stage Ker is fifty-three years of age and argues that she lacks even 'the commonest necessities of life'. She is so afflicted with the gout that she is losing the use of her right hand, and to add to the hardship of the household her husband has also been ill with 'a very severe cold'. Closing this letter, Ker states that she will pray to God for 'a favourable response'. She receives £5 from the Fund, before applying again on 1 May 1821, complaining of an 'abscess in the breast, which the faculty thought a very singular case. The discharge was immense and reduced her to a deplorable state'. Owing to this illness, Ker had for some time been confined on medical advice to her house. Wanting sufficient funds, however, she had not been attended by a nurse. Receiving no response to this request, Ker writes, on 12 June 1821, to remind the Fund of her previous letter and to press for a reply. Again obtaining no answer, she persists in writing one final petition on 27 October 1821, which is declined.

     Whilst the content of these letters is informative with regard to the physical and financial circumstances of Ker's life at this point (or at least they indicate Ker's representation of her life), their tone and register also contribute to our understanding of Ker's character as worldly, astute, and bold. When writing of her debts and of having traded her furniture, Ker espouses a knowledge of, and competence in, discussing economic issues and practical problems which is at odds with contemporary formulations and concerns in which women of the middling rank ought to have been engaged. Additionally, in describing herself as 'stranded' and 'destitute of friends', Ker plays the role of the helpless female in order to elicit a protective, and hopefully generous, response from the men of the Fund, and in this displays a shrewd capacity to manipulate expected gender roles. This is clearly no more than a performance though: we see further evidence here of Ker's refusal to adhere to such formulations of femininity. In keeping with the unveiling of her identity palpable in the prefaces to her novels, Ker's letters to the Fund demonstrate a willingness to externalise her private life, of which her explicitly detailed disclosure of her breast abscess is a notable example. This period of asperity was experienced by Ker whilst living with her husband at 48 Wellington Street, Newington Causeway, Surrey, and led to her death, aged fifty-four, in 1821.

     The fiction that Ker had written throughout her career was part of a body of works which, though denounced by reviewers and largely forgotten today, is nonetheless representative of the novel as it was experienced and engaged with by most women readers of the time. Ker's novels demonstrate that this reading material could be surprisingly questioning and unorthodox in parts, and in this way is worthy of study for its impact upon the reader, if not for its artistic value. We have also seen that Ker was one of a number of Romantic women writers to appeal to the Royal Literary Fund. Her financial hardships and talent for persuading the powerful to come to her aid offers some indication of the life led by many female authors, which, particularly as the period progressed and saw the edging out of women by male writers, was a hard one. On a more personal level, Ker was influenced by a passionate and determined father and connected with a circle of somewhat unorthodox aristocrats, and subsequently became an interesting character controversial for her projection of a public self that was at odds with the norm. Through her writing, she participated in and reflects to us today some of the debates about women's writing and reading that are so important in the history of the novel. Owing to her presence in this discourse, Ker came to occupy an unmasked and worldly position in the communal sphere of the literary market, from which she boldly advocated a view of novelistic discourse at this time as a commercial, female-centred activity.