page_title: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun
section_title: Recommended to Mercy
hierarchical_section_title: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun / Writing / Novels / Recommended to Mercy
caption_attribution_description: English: Recommended to Mercy 1869 Matilda Houstoun
context_page_description: Matilda Charlotte Houstoun was a British travel writer, novelist, biographer, and women's right activist. She is best known for her series of travel writings, particularly Texas and the Gulf of Mexico and Hesperos, and their observations about African-American life during the times of the Confederate Deep South. Later on, she turned her pen from novels to social reform, particularly on the rights of working class women and single mothers. During her lifetime, her best known work was Recommended to Mercy, a female-driven "yellow-back" novel published in 1862.
context_section_description: Recommended to Mercy was at the time of its publication said to be possibly banned by Mudie's publishing group. In the end,  William Harrison Ainsworth had to recommend that Mercy had to be self published by Houstoun,  being picked up after its fourth edition and success in papers like The Times,  by Tinsley publishers for its two shilling yellowback series in 1869. 
  Mercy’s protagonist is Helen Langton or Vaughan, a fallen woman. Mercy includes common sentimental novel tropes (like bigamy trials or marriage infidelity) but due to Houstoun’s writing of Helen’s actions as an ‘experienced heroine’ (the fallen woman trope subverted and re-examined), Mercy has been reclassified by modern scholars as a ‘novel of experience’.  
  Helen sets an example for a ‘more radically... wifely loyalty without the legitimisation of a marriage contract.’ Throughout Mercy are example of loveless marriages which are played in opposition to Helens societally unconventional relationship to her lover, Philip Thornleigh. Helen subverts the audience's expectations by choosing to be a mistress rather than be married unhappily to a stranger, condemning such marriages as ‘errors [for which] she saw no excuse’.  Helen therefore ‘disregards the social and legal absolutes’ of Victorian societal expectation to instead ‘privately carry out [her] ideals’ she holds for her own happiness.  Houstoun also extended these principles to Helen’s happiness in her work, and in Helen’s belief in work for post-maternal mothers.
  Houstoun lays some blame for perpetuating these societal expectations with women themselves. Characters such as Mrs.Wraxham attempts to socially ostracize Helen for her own financial incentive for example.  Helen is written as an example of Houstouns proto-feminist relationship dynamics wherein she is generous and charitable to other women, promoting ‘the importance of women’s relationships to social harmony’ in the favour of other women's agency which Houstoun prompts the reader to follow by example.
  The narrator uses a number of these polemics to denounce and examine a number of the supposed judgements the audience would make of the fallen woman trope,  so that the reader becomes empathic to Helen, leading the reader to question the value systems which otherwise prevent Helen from thus becoming an accepted member of society.
  Houstoun ends the novel when Helen is ‘middle-aged’ and ‘resigned to her status’ which is said to be a precursor to the New Woman genre for its ending of ‘uneasy alliance’ of work and Helen’s ‘radical’ personal moral and ethics.
caption: Recommended to Mercy 1869
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