This paper started with a burst of laughter. I was reading Isabella Kelly's 1805 novel, The Secret. In Chapter 16 of Vol. I, I was reading of the orphan Berthaline's inexplicable attraction to desire as a father the man her female hostess, Mrs. Ellesmere, calls base and depraved. Following the sad tale of Lord Glenclullen's crimes and Berthaline's lament over her being fatherless, the narrator informs us that the two women eat some sandwiches in an effort to forget their melancholy (I: 163). The introduction of the sandwiches struck me as terribly funny--it was such an anti-climatic, unromantic, and to my twentieth-century sensibilities, a lower-class sort of consolation, that it struck me as ludicrous.

In my reading of late eighteenth-century women's novels from 1775 to 1815, I began to notice the introduction of information on diet, exercise, and hygiene. Rarely did such detail have the ludicrous impact of Isabella Kelly's sandwiches, however. My search for an answer to why women writers would include such details of diet, exercise, and hygiene, lead me to formulate the hypothesis that these details are included to demonstrate that certain female characters have a high degree of self-control and independence and are deeply concerned with moral issues. What is the connection between sandwiches and female independence and morality? The bridge between these disparate things begins with the eighteenth-century self-help movement that promoted regime as a means to longevity. Some of the more popular self-help writers that promoted regime include George Cheyne, John Wesley, William Buchan, and James Graham. This bridge then extends through the conduct books and polemical writings of women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Priscilla Wakefield, and Elizabeth Hamilton.

The chain of logic linking details of diet, exercise, and regime to female independence consists of the belief that self- control of the body strengthened not only a person's body, but their mental abilities and morals as well. The books and articles of the self-help culture of the eighteenth-century however sometimes prescribed different regimes of diet, exercise, and hygiene for each sex, and more frequently simply assumed a male readership. Women writers at the end of the century used the culture's allocation of the education and care of young children to women to justify the importance of women concerning themselves with preventive medical regimes--an area of discourse in which medicine, morality, and education intersected. Female physical weakness was linked to female mental and moral weaknesses and all three were attacked together in such works as Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Priscilla Wakefield's 1798 Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, and Elizabeth Hamilton's 1801 and 1802 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education.

Given the limit time limits of this talk, I have rather arbitrarily chosen four works by three women novelists to focus upon to test my hypothesis that women's novels link independent, self-controlled, and moral women with a concern for their exercise, diet, and hygiene. Thus, these details are included not because women lack the ability to discriminate between the trivial and the significant, but as aids in judging female characters and to promote female readers' personal development by encouraging female self-treatment. I will discuss the promotion of female exercise using Francis Burney's 1814 The Wanderer and then analyze the promotion of vegetarianism in two novels of Elizabeth Helme, her internationally popular Lousia, or the Cottage on the Moor, first published in 1787, and her 1801 Minerva-Press Gothic, St. Margaret's Cave. Lastly, I will discuss the promotion of hygiene using Elizabeth Hamilton's most popular work, her 1809 The Cottagers of Glenburnie.

It may seem that I have rather arbitrarily chosen to focus on women's writing, rather than exploring the use of regime in the novels of both sexes. I have found some evidence, however, that the inclusion of details about food, exercise, and cleanliness, was perceived as a characteristic of women's writing in the late eighteenth-century and criticized as a reflection of feminine mental weaknesses. William Beckford's 1796 Modern Novel Writing is a satiric attack on what he perceived as a characteristically feminine style of novel writing. One of the running jokes in this work is the inclusion of irrelevant and anti-climactic details about food. We first see this in Chapter Four, entitled "A Polite Circle." The talk of the polite circle first is of Lucinda's gloom, followed by her tears and fainting (I:25-6). Then Lord Mahogany addresses sedition (I:26). These serious topics are then undercut by the text next dwelling on the tea urn being spilled on a lapdog (I:26-7). Other odd and irrelevant domestic details intrude on throughout the story: we are told the venison is over- roasted (I:29), after a bout of tears we hear of the five items served for tea (I:63), in the midst of speculating whether her love is cheating on her, Arabella notes "the custards were all spoiled" (I:187).

More significantly in volume two, the text mocks women's embracing of radical theories about the connection between mind and body. We are told "Amelia turned her thoughts on speculative philosophy, and soon discovered the power of the human Will, by a proper exertion of which, she could conquer the approach of sleep and hunger with a marvellous facility" (II:81). Beckford is poking fun here, not only at the radical theories of William Godwin about going without sleep in order to live longer and of James Graham suggesting that periodically going without food aids longevity, but the propensity of women to embrace these theories and advance them in their writing.

Beckford's satire suggests that my initial response of a laugh to encountering Isabella Kelly's sandwiches is the correct response. A poem of female novelist Clara Reeve captures the double-bind women writers faced in choosing a masculine or feminine style of writing. Reeve's conservative poem "To my Friend Mrs.- -- On her holding an Argument in Favour of the Natural Equality of both the sexes. Written in the Year MDCCLVI [1756]," a poem first published in 1769, accepts the superiority of a masculine style. She criticizes female writings as containing "Strong markings of the female mind,/Still superficial, light, and various;/Loose, unconnected, and precarious" (20-22). Masculine writing in contrast has "weight and energy ... That strength that fills the manly page,/And bids it live to future age ..." (25-7). Yet Reeve sees masculine women as ridiculous figures, concluding "For what in man is most respected,/In woman's form shall be rejected" (49- 50).

One type of twentieth-century feminist aesthetics, an extreme form of American cultural feminism, simply argues that we should reverse this aesthetic dichotomy and promote a digressive, messy style as beautiful. For example, Rachel Blau DuPlessis' now classic essay on female style, "For the Etruscans," asserts, incidently itself using such as style: "The holistic sense of life without the exclusionary wholeness of art. These holistic forms: inclusion, apparent nonselection, because selection is censorship of the unknown, the between, the data, the germ, the interstitial, the bit of sighting that the writer cannot place" (265). I do not see this as the answer to this aesthetic question.

I will now attempt to show that by regaining a sense of the late eighteenth-century's attitudes towards certain foods and preventive medical regimes and the way in which gender and such preventive medical regimes interacted in that time, the presence of the sandwiches becomes not ludicrous, but reasonable and symbolic. Our society is still patriarchal enough that for a woman to turn to alcohol or smoking after a traumatic day is less acceptable than for a man to do so. But what of tea or coffee? We have lost the sense of disapproval of such drinks current in the late eighteenth-century. Medical disapproval of tea and coffee, particularly for women who were perceived to have weaker nerves than men, was common. Such medical commonplaces are even reflected in women's novels of the time. Elizabeth Hamilton asserts in her 1800 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers that the women of England have unstrung nerves due to "the destructive and debilitating habit of tea-drinking" (I:233). Dr. Graham in his 1793 New and Curious Treatise of the Nature and Effects of Simple Earth, Water, and Air goes even farther and asserts that "the daily use, not to mention the abuse of tea, [and] coffee" combined with "close, foul air" scrapes and debilitates "the most useful parts of women ... poisoning and rotting in the root and bud their posterity" (14).

Exercise for women, like tea-drinking, was equally controversial. Mary Anne Hanway's 1797 Ellinor; or, The World As It Is places in the mouth of Lady John Dareall, the Duchess of Dreadnought, feminist arguments that exercise is deliberately discouraged in women to keep them weak and dependent upon men. In volume two, Lady John argues for female education and female physical development in terms that echo Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lady John laments that women "with ... minds enervated by an education calculated to debilitate both the corporeal and mental system, ... look not into themselves for support, but lean on man, whose vaunted strength arises from their weakness" (II:302). She complains that girls "are immured in the nursery, ... rarely feeling the use of their legs, but in their perambulations round their prison-room;--for, if the wind is in the south it is too close; if in the north, it is too cold for them to encounter .... There is so small a portion of times or season, when their lady- mother can permit them to walk" (II:304). "Can it be expected, from such enervating management, that the body can be otherwise that weak and sickly? and mind is too intimately connected with it, not to partake of a debility" (II: 305).

Mary Wollstonecraft attempts to encourage female exercise in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by associating female physical and mental weaknesses with men's contempt (9) and female strength of mind and body with the friendship of a husband (29). Wollstonecraft tries to convince her male readers that much of the childish behavior for which they despise young women would disappear if "girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and [were] not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed" (62).

Priscilla Wakefield's 1798 Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex devotes chapter two to a less emotional argument for female exercise. She diplomatically questions "why are the advantages of the most probable mode of improving the natural qualities of the [body and mind] ... are not permitted to be extended with an equal hand to both sexes" (13), given that "It is an opinion, pretty well established, that the connexion between the mind and the body is of so close and reciprocal a nature, that the health of the one materially depend upon the vigorous condition of the other" (12). Wakefield makes the same connection as Dr. Graham between a mother's diet and her children's health to argue that female inactivity "must contribute to the production of a puny offspring, inadequate to the noble energies of patriotism and virtue" (16).

The promotion of health by attention to exercise, diet, and hygiene of course is not new in the late eighteenth-century and dates back to at least the ancient world. The writers of self- help books or articles devoted to promoting regimens were working in a literary tradition that directly extended back to the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in England. Older works promoting regime remained important in the late eighteenth- century, particularly John Arbuthnot's Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments, George Cheyne's 1724 Essay on Health and Long Life, and John Wesley's 1747 medical work, Primitive Physic which by 1791 was in its 23rd edition. Ginnie Smith's 1985 study of sixty-two self-help books published in England between 1770 and 1820, asserts that "medical skepticism along a wide front certainly contributed to the strong revival of the advice book market in the 1770s, and strongly sustained it up to c. 1810" (263). Smith argues that "The evidence of content tends to support the idea that these works were nurtured by a broad popular base .... Bibliographic evidence suggests ... that we are not talking of an elite readership only, but one which potentially stretched down to all but the very poorest" (281).

Roy Porter's 1985 study of the medical articles, in what he describes as "easily the most successful, and the most enduring, periodical of the age" (292), The Gentleman's Magazine, asserts that not only were medical topics of popular interest but that "the weight of the medical entries suggests that the literate laity were not just passive uncomprehending recipients of medical treatment, for they could be expected to possess considerable medical familiarity, and hence be in a position to exercise some therapeutic judgement" (313). In other words, the articles suggest self-treatment was common among the readership of this journal.

Frances Burney's 1814 The Wanderer gives us some indication that an attention to regime was associated with the middle and upper-classes. The heroine's money-driven landlady, Miss Matson, emphatically rejects the idea that the urban poor should care about their health. She exclaims: "`People that have their living to get, and that a'n't worth a farthing, have other things to think of than air and exercise!" (384). Then referring to an impoverish woman worker whom she is considering evicting for her suspicious morning departures, Miss Matson dismisses the notion that exercise is the explanation for her morning walks: "`She does not, I hope, give herself quite such airs as those!'" (384). Burney's heroine Juliet is disgusted by this attitude. Juliet is Burney's most mature and health-conscious heroine, a woman who is aware of how much her independent survival without family or husband depends upon her maintaining good health. The novel shows Juliet consciously juxtaposing two approaches to maintaining health--one considered more appropriate for women and another that bears similarities to the regimes advocated by such self-help writers as George Cheyne, John Wesley, and William Buchan.

Juliet's attempt to maintain her health using the techniques usually suggested to women fail miserably. Burney details this approach: "She durst not venture to walk out except in the sun- shine; she forbore to refresh herself near an open window; and retreated from every unclosed door, lest humidity, or the sharpness of the wind, or a sudden storm, should again affect her voice; and she guarded her whole person from the changing elements, as sedulously as if age, infirmity, or disease, had already made her health the slave of prudential forethought" (320). Burney makes the link between this approach and the common physical weaknesses attributed to women: "The faint warmth of a constantly shut up apartment; the total deprivation of that spring which exercise gives to strength, and fresh air to existence, soon operated a change in her whole appearance. Her frame grew weaker; ... she was shaken by every sound, and menaced with becoming a victim to all the tremors, and all the languors of nervous disorders" (320-1). Juliet, however, we are told "relinquished this dangerous and enervating system" and was by "the exertions of exercise ... restored to the enjoyment of her excellent constitution" (321). The novel is full of examples of Juliet walking in the fresh air for exercise. Many of the novel's key scenes occur outside during Juliet's walks--including for example, her reunion with Gabriella, the dramatic religious conversion of Elinor, and her reunion with the bishop.

Burney also contrasts the simple diet of the morally superior and independent Juliet with the luxuries of the table of the racist and sadistic Mrs. Ireton--luxuries such as colored ices which Mrs. Ireton makes sure are denied to her companion Juliet (516). Yet, diet plays a minor role in The Wanderer. In contrast in some of the novels of Elizabeth Helme, diet, and particularly the controversial vegetarian diet, is promoted.

The good effects of a non-meat diet, which Cheyne calls the "Milk, Seed, and Vegetable Diet" was stressed by Cheyne, Wesley, and Graham among other writers. Wesley did eventually become a vegetarian (Smith 268). However, none of their major works advocated maintaining this diet completely, and in fact Cheyne was mocked for his, to use Roy Porter's terms, "gourmandizing grossness" (301). Yet Cheyne eulogized such a diet granting it amazing curative powers. In his 1733 The English Malady Cheyne argued "Even Homer ... could observe, that ... Milk and Vegetable Eaters ... were the longest liv'd, and honestest of Men. Milk and Honey was the Complexion of the Land of Promise, and Vegetables the Diet of the Paradisiacal State: and since such a Diet will ... certainly cure, by the Confessions of all Physicians, learned and unlearned, ancient or modern, High or Low-livers, the Gout, the Consumption, and the Scurvy, and such like atrocious, otherwise incurable and mortal Distempers; it will certainly be true also ... what will do to the greater, will do the less of the same kind" (368). Graham echoes this theory and stresses the moral benefits of such a diet, proclaiming: "A spare and simple diet, contributes greatly to the prolongation of this life--and to felicity in the eternal spiritual worlds" (A New and Curious Treatise of the Nature and Effects of Simple Earth 24).

Elizabeth Helme did not advocate a purely vegetarian diet. In her Maternal Instruction, for example, she merely stresses the need for people to eat sufficient food to avoid a "weakly constitution" and not to avoid evils of eating too much which not only `distends the bowels' but causes one to become "dull and lethargic" (45). In two of her novels, however, a largely vegetarian diet is linked to the most moral characters and the connection between diet and morality is stressed by the way diet is introduced. In Helme's first and most successful novel, Louisa, which went through five editions in its first year of publication, a vegetarian diet is linked first with kindness to animals. Mrs. Rivers explains that why her supper consists only of "vegetables and eggs" (I:18), by explaining that the butcher comes only once a week and that her fowls cannot be killed because "I grew so attached to my feathered companions, that I would not by any means have them hurt" (I:19). Later in Chapter Six of Volume One, Helme makes more clear how a vegetable diet shows moral development. The narrator informs us Mrs. Rivers and Louisa "now sat down to their vegetable supper, with a thankfulness and peace I fear are not always the companions of more sumptuous entertainments, and then retired to rest, with minds so free from guile, that had they waked in eternity, neither envy, malice, nor any other discordant passion would have prevented their everlasting welfare" (I:38-9). This passage is more remarkable when we recall in Chapter One, Louisa appears splattered with the blood of a would-be rapist she stabbed in self-defense (I:9-10).

Helme's heroines are strong, independent women who can survive on their own. Devendra P. Varma, the great critic of Gothic novels, noted how unusual Helme's Gothic heroines are in his introduction to the Arno edition of her St. Margaret's Cave. Varma comments these heroines "develop out of the Radcliffe mould into dynamic, proud and independent characters; they are no longer meek and frail beauties swooning at every critical juncture, or always tearful in the diabolical clutches of the villain" (xiv-xv). The heroines of both Louisa and St. Margaret's Cave in fact walk outdoors regularly, eat a largely egg and vegetable diet, and at times endure roughing it outdoors overnight. Incidently, Burney's Juliet also spends a night outdoors without her health suffering from it.

Elizabeth Hamilton's heroine of her 1808 The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Mrs. Mason, does not spend a night outdoors, but is font of knowledge about hygiene and diet and manages to reform the personal habits of an entire village by the end of the novel. Mrs. Mason's morals are confirmed in the last sentence of the novel which hints that she will be given a heavenly reward for her philanthropic work: she "spent the last days of a useful life; looking ... to the future with the full assurance of the hope which is mingled with peace and joy" (402). The novel is so full of the details of Mrs. Mason's battle against hairs in her food, bugs in her bed, and of getting water to wash with each morning, that Caroline Davidson found the details of cleaning and cooking techniques useful in reconstructing the women's work of the late eighteenth-century when writing her A Woman's Work is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles: 1650-1950.

Mrs. Mason is one of the first handicapped heroines of the novel. She was crippled when saving some children from a fire, which makes her physical efforts to pursue cleanliness more remarkable in the face of the unwillingness of others to help her or even acknowledge the worthiness of being clean. When we look at Elizabeth Hamilton's 1801-2 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, we see her linking women's physical weakness with what she terms "sexual prejudice" (272). Hamilton's sees the causes of women's oppression to have stemmed historically from physical inferiority, asserting "As society advance in its progress towards civilization, the mental powers begin to rise into importance; but the associations of contempt, which the inferiority with regard to physical strength, had originally generated, continue to operate, and debar females from those opportunities of improvement which gradually open on the other sex" (258).

Thus, the fact that I laughed at Isabella Kelly's sandwiches and find much of Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie a horror story of subhuman living conditions is a sign of my twentieth-century origins--an age in which cleanliness and exercise for men and women is the cultural norm and in which secularism has eroded almost all perceptions of tea and coffee, and even a moderate use of beer and wine, as immoral and debilitating. And I think that women writers such as Burney, Helme, and Hamilton will forgive modern readers for missing the point of their connection between strong, independent women and a healthy attention to diet, exercise, and hygiene if it is the result of a sense that the two sexes are equally encouraged to adapt such preventive medical regimes and are equally free to develop bodies, minds, and morals to the highest degree possible.