Elizabeth Meeke’s The Abbey of Clugny

The Abbey of Clugny itself is a formulaic novel, using misattributions of identity, disguises, and alternative identities to make up for an often-lackluster plot. While such a description is hardly a glowing endorsement of the text, one corrective a critical edition of the novel could offer is to provide a character list to help readers track these various character names and identities. The novel centers around a young man alternately known as Alexis de Wielbourg, the Marquis de St. Cernin and Alphonso, who as an infant was mysteriously delivered into the care of the Baron Wielbourg. On the eve of marriage to his adopted sister, the Baron’s niece Alphonsine, Alexis’s supposed father, the Duke de Longueville, discovers he is still living and brings him back to Paris. Over the course of the novel, Alexis’s true parentage is revealed, through a series of coincidental encounters with various parties who slowly unravel the mystery of his birth. In the intervening sections of the narrative, Alexis and his compatriots visit the eponymous Abbey of Clugny, located just outside of Souvigny, which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of its recently-deceased Abbess. Borrowing the popularity of Ann Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural,” the ghosts that appear in the novel are almost immediately revealed to the reader as fraudulent, suggesting Meeke’s discomfort with the idea of true belief in ghosts. The narrator’s attitude toward religion—particularly Catholicism—and French politics and culture more broadly are ambivalent and complex throughout the text. The critical introduction will offer some context based on what is known about Meeke’s travels in France to help situate the reader within the text.