Reread, January 2025: I read this again for a book group I’m newly involved with, which is run under the auspices of Chawton House and focuses on literature from the (very) long 18th century. The last time I read it, I found it incredibly frustrating and even unpleasant, at times; it’s a novel that relies on prolonged misunderstanding, a plot device that has made me frantic with anxiety since I was a small child. One of the great things about discussing a novel with other people, though, is the different angles you get on it. The opening chapters of The Natural Daughter are strongly reminiscent of stage comedy: the dialogue between our heroine Martha, her sanctimonious sister Julia, and her ill-matched parents, her peevish father and obtuse mother, is very funny and feels zingy in the manner of Restoration drama. There was an excellent observation in discussion about the general behaviour of men in this novel: Austen’s heroines always get to marry someone decent, but the love interest here is—although not evil—somewhat famed as a heartbreaker, and the rest of the men are either genial buffoons or malevolent hypocrites. My contribution was to do with the ambivalence of Robinson’s portrayal of Martha’s “naturalness” as an actress and writer. She turns to writing to support herself, as Robinson did, but finds that she’s too sincere to be able to adapt to the fickle and lowbrow literary market; yet her stage acting is superb, precisely because she’s unaffected and convincing; her social status in the real world, however, is constantly menaced by her inability to “dissemble” or “flatter” wealthy unworthies. It’s a very curious combination of traits, and reflects, I think, a wariness about adaptability, a sense that its value depends on context and on an unquantifiable type of personal integrity. Source: old personal copy

Originally read July 2023: You know when you’re watching a movie and the protagonist is caught in some compromising situation like, idk, they’re standing over a dead body holding a pair of pruning shears, and the antagonist(s) are all like “aha! YOU are the killer!” and actually our hero-/ine was just doing some pruning and stumbled over the body and the cause of death wasn’t stabbing-with-garden-shears anyway but they don’t EXPLAIN any of this, they just meekly go to jail and start working on their appeal, and you’re screaming “JUST TELL THEM THE HEDGE NEEDED SOME WORK” at the screen? The Natural Daughter is like that, but for “dead body”, read “illegitimate baby”, and for “pruning shears”, read “basic human decency”. A better novel than Robinson's previous one, Walsingham, but wildly stressful.