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The situation depicted appears to resembles that in the first painting in Augustus Egg’s triptych Past and Present, but Shirley Gérard’s rather poorly written short story reveals that the “Unhappy Discovery” is not a husband’s or wife’s secret infidelity but an unfortunate, ultimately tragic consanguinity: Guy, the seated man covering his eyes, has just read a letter from a dead friend that reveals his adopted daughter Lucy is in fact so closely related to him that she cannot marry his brother, who now turns out to be her uncle. The story, which takes the form of reading a letter about a letter, ends with the fragile girl’s death. It is weakened throughout by the vocabulary of sentimental melodrama in which every adjective describes extreme goodness or vicious evil when such heightening serves little purpose. The opening seems borrowed from Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the girl’s fragility and consequent death from Verdi’s La Traviata.

Bibliography

Gérard, Shirley. “An Old Oak Cabinet and Its Contents.” The Keepsake. Ed. Miss Power. London: David Bogue, 1857. 47-72. Hathi Trust Digital Library version of a copy in the Princeton University Library. Web. 21 July 2020.

Created 29 July 2020