‘”You can’t marry your grandmother”: face and place in Lady Adelaide’s oath.’

Like other sensation novels (including most famously her own East Lynne), Ellen Wood’s Lady Adelaide’s Oath (1867) configures its readers and many of its characters as ‘face-blind’. When the supposedly dead heir to the Dane estate inevitably reappears, he draws the reader’s attention by his suspicious use of a silk eye-screen to conceal his face; his son’s resemblance to other members of the family is occasionally remarked on but quickly dismissed. These various failures of recognition are fraught with irony. Lord Dane’s heir is repulsed as an adventurer, and finally arrested for housebreaking on the testimony of a designing housekeeper, Tiffle. Tiffle herself is later revealed as an unmarried mother and possibly the daughter of the disreputable Granny Bean.

The traditional structures of place-based, community identity are constantly destabilised, undermining the mutual recognition of upper-class figures. Local suspicion of the supposed William Lydney rests on a failure to find his name in accessible records of landed families, when he is not recognised in his own ancestral home. The middle-aged Cecilia Dane intuits his status only because she finds him attractive. Her ultimate disappointment is brutally parodied in the language of family connection, when she opens her Bible at the words ‘A man may not marry his grandmother.’

The novel finally insists on the appropriateness of facial recognition, as a key trope inflecting community structures. But these cultural configurations are in turn determined by the ability to negotiate place. Access to secret rooms, woods, streets and the sea itself is governed by a recognised, hierarchical code. What characters see and how their presence in a given location is interpreted, depends on who they are - or are assumed to be.