Harriet Lee, born in London, was one of five daughters of actor-playwright John Lee and actress Anna Lee. We know few details about her life. As Napier and Shattock note, Lee moved to Bath in 1781 and started a school for girls with her sisters Sophia and Ann, in part from the proceeds from Sophia's comedy, The Chapter of Accidents. She never married, but received and refused a proposal from William Godwin in 1798. She died in 1851 at the age of 94, in Clifton.

As Lee writes in her Advertisement, The Mysterious Marriage had an unsuccessful trip to the stage, despite its inclusion of gothic ingredients for which audiences may have clamoured. As Paula Backscheider observes, "It is hard to find an eighteenth-century gothic play that did not have a respectable initial run and regular revivals, and many had truly phenomenal success" (153). Backscheider's definition of the genre pinpoints the dramatist's "use of archaic settings and attempts to portray the terrifying as well as the presence of such icons as skulls, shrouds, bones of limbs or rib cages, daggers, moving curtains, and flickering lights" (154). Including "strong elements of melodrama," Gothic drama promised "consumers a definite setting, a particular cast of characters (which in this case implied predictable casting decisions and acting styles), a restricted repertoire of highly readable cultural icons, and a limited number of . . . 'lines of action'" (154-56)

In The Mysterious Marriage, the titular marriage is the secret union of Albert and Constantia. The latter is the heiress of Roselva, along with her twin, Sigismond. However, the identity of the latter is unknown because as a child, he was stolen from the land during a siege. In the same siege, the twins' parents were killed and their uncle, now Count Roselva, usurped his elder brother's position and raised his own daughter, the Countess, as the heiress of Roselva. Albert is a courtier who requires quick resources to secure his position and seeks them in a marriage to the Countess, which her father encourages in order to fend off accusations against his own secretive past. The Countess is unwilling because she is in love with Sigismond and knows of Constantia's love for Albert. Albert must overcome the obstacle of his own secret marriage to Constantia, however; he has poisoned her and she dies shortly. He does not live to marry the Countess, however, because his treachery makes him over-eager to take her from her home and he is stabbed by one of the Count's faithful servants. Sigismond's true identity is revealed when an amulet of Constantia is given to him by the Countess. It matches his own and signals to him a lost sister. He is recognized in the final scene by a prisoner of war who tells him about his past just before the Count dies of wounds sustained during battle.

As Jeffrey Cox suggests, the gothic process sees a move from a closed, imprisoning space to an open one, a move from a prison to a freer future (20). Although the opening scenes depict a world with a fairly stable surface, despite the secrets that lurk beneath it, the early scenes also imply a sense of confinement that is communicated by the dialogue's emphasis on scrutiny and evaluation. It is clear from his early conversations that Osmond has kept a sharp eye on Sigismond and the Countess's attraction to one another, for example, and Uberto observes that he can "spy out love" in the Countess. The potential match of the heiress and the prisoner is the subject of gossip. Although the objects of speculation, Sigismond and the Countess are also watchful of each other. Sigismond tells the Countess that she is his "monitress" but she in her turn reminds him not to be too explicit in his lover's talk because they themselves "may be observ'd." The Countess tells Constantia that she can look "a secret" and identify in Constantia a love she may try to hide from others. This is a world of close contact between characters who, as the objects of others' scrutiny, must attempt to hide secrets carefully and who are therefore vulnerable to exposure.

This claustrophia is emphasized as well by one of the two main mysteries of the play: the Count has carried his secret for years and it is an omnipresent threat to his sense of security. He tells the Countess about her father's shame and attempts to circumvent exposure by arranging the marriage to Albert. The truth about his familial dealings is never actually exposed to the world, and before his own death, he discovers an even greater secret than that hidden by his own treachery, the existence of Constantia's twin in Sigismond. The Count does seem, just before he dies, to grant the Countess leave to tell the tale. He is thus freed finally of his past, but is allowed no time to enjoy a truthful life and he sinks before the true Heir of Roselva, Sigismond.

The language of observation that Lee uses to create a sense of confinement is heightened by references to sickness and infection. Constantia is, of course, literally poisoned by the powders administered by Albert. All of the characters seem to be touched somehow with a literal or metaphorical ailment: "the Countess hath the spleen—Sigismond is sad—and the Lady Constantia sick" observes Mathias, and Uberto notes that Lord Albert "hath all complaints at once! He hath the court fever." Albert describes his evil as a "black venom / That taints thy blood" and that has an "infectious pow'r" that steals over his heart and "poison[s] all its joys." The process of the play is thus to oust the sickness from the community, as the Physician declares: "All shall be examined; and where the black speck is, there must we apply the caustic."

The "specks" of pride and ambition invade this community from within, in the form of the Count, and from without in the form of Albert: Lee explores how ambition prompts rash men to undertake guilty acts that include denying heirs their birthright, poisoning innocent women, and coercing marriages. The Count's guilt emerges from his unwillingness, because of his pride, to permit authority to pass along a recognized familial line from parent to child, instead replacing an heir with himself. This act seems to haunt him and makes all the easier his willingness to give his daughter in marriage to a man whose own ambition is murderous. Albert's political ambition demands that he hide his lost fortunes and fallen courtly status, and destroy Constantia and their secret marriage. Sigismond, whose only ambition seems to be to please his beloved Countess, moves beyond his lowly social status so that his position finally matches his noble deportment. What unites these three male figures—the Count, Albert, and Sigismond—is their focus on the Countess, one seeking love, one seeking self-protective control, and one seeking social promotion and wealth.

The Count's desire to preserve his ignominy from the world's scrutiny and in the process maintain the family lands is rivalled by Albert's egotism that seeks wealth at any cost. Lee's gothic villain is fairly typical. As Backscheider notes, the gothic villain

Albert does, like every believable gothic rogue, push "the absolute limits of what the audience imagines to be possible in nature [and] . . . is subject to cataclysmic passions, has committed or is contemplating unspeakable crimes . . . and experience[s] periods of madness" (Backscheider 163). From his first appearance on the stage, he is a chastizing and proud man with a bold thirst for power. A "fallen favourite," he intends to "prop / [his] tottering fortunes with Roselva's pow'r" and at the same time, crush "the puny insects that would sting me thus." His ultimate aim is that "rank / The wealth, and numerous minions of my will, / Conjointly with my personal daring well / Might awe ev'n royalty." His desire, like the Count's, is to use the Countess for self-protection and further, for self-advancement. The swift marriage proposal and acceptance is thus beneficial to both men; the Count seeks to protect his reputation, while Albert pursues the wealth that will solidify his social position. Both rely on the pliancy of a woman for their success, a pliancy born of feminine submission to male prerogative and the men's perception of the legitimacy of their use of physical dominance.

Albert's own treachery is also marked by madness. The character experiences emotional extremes, alternately weak or fearful and stormingly abusive. He mutters that his own reason is "sick" when Constantia tells him that she has observed a change in him. Later, as his plottings thicken, he is confronted by weird visions:

      Thought's fantastic brood
      Alone is waking:—present—past, and future,
      Wild, mis-shaped hopes, and horrible rememb'rings,
      Now rise a hideous and half viewless chaos
      To fancy's vision—till the stout heart freeze
      At its own retrospect.

Albert's tenuous mental stability is most challenged when he is confronted by thoughts about Constantia and his aggression towards her, and then by a vision of her. Albert's cold forsaking of her is, of course, a prelude to her death. She emerges at the end of Act Two raving of the "medicine" that "hath kill'd [her]." This suggests that she knows the true source of her agony and she seems to look around wildly for Albert who is, of course, absent.

Sigismond's nobility is most remarkable to the Countess. When we first see them together, the two embark upon a discussion about the difference between codified behaviour and genuine courtesy. Sigismond apologizes for failing to offer up the "boar's rough spoils" to the Countess, but she observes that

      [she] should have deem'd the uncouth gift misplaced:
      And honour more the instinctive human polish
      That bade thee spare it, than the laboured courtesy
      That with a bloody spoil would grace a woman.

Although both are governed to a certain extent by societal expectations about their behaviour, the Countess in particular, what Sigismond and the Countess share is their scorn for these old forms of "laboured courtesy" that ossify people into roles. The Countess, when she is courted by Sigismond, is aware of her sex's "wonted forms" that forbid her to speak of her love, but she struggles against them and she openly but embarrassedly declares her awareness of his virtue. For his part, Sigismond denies an interest in the Countess's wealth, but seeks instead "The woman only" rather than the heiress. Suitably enough, before she is joined with him she actually loses her heiress's status to him when she realizes who he really is.

The opposition of friend and father is brought to crisis point when the Countess denies her father his wish and refuses to marry Albert. In making this decision, founded in "heaven's mandate," the Countess refuses to "invade" with her "treach'rous pow'r" Constantia's rights. However, in denying her father his wish, the Countess also pardons his actions in a short homage to the trials of fatherhood:

By contrast to a suffering father, the daughter sees in her own privilege a disavowal of the need to dishonour Constantia and take her place as Roselva's heiress or as Albert's bride. She decries having to "inflict" a wrong on this "helpless—suffering friend." Her virtue is met only by her father's contempt and his fashioning of himself as a crucified and degraded man who in his age must bend to "be an infant's vassal." His choice of words as he pictures the fate he believes the Countess forces upon him tellingly represents his living in the past.

Backscheider writes that the Gothic dramas propagate "a comforting vision of community, of human nature, and of a providential, benignly ordered world" (232):

The order restored at the end of the play is comforting because of the Countess and Sigismond's benevolence, mannerly superiority, and true merit. The focus of so much admiration throughout the play, they are blessed at the end as the "Young, lovely, innocent." Although it is chance that brings the characters together at the start of the tale (the chance meeting in the woods that allows Sigismond to save the Count) and that restores the Heirship (the prisoner who chances upon Sigismond after the battle), a larger narrative of propriety and leadership rights is advanced here that satisfies any desire for the orderly transfer of familial and communal power, the filial obedience of a daughter who is not finally punished for her willingness to do her father's bidding, and the union of peasants and soldiers in a chorus to even a guilty father and warrior's victory and death.

Works Cited:

• Backscheider, Paula R. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993.
• Cox, Jeffrey N., Ed. Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992.
• Genest, John. Some Account of the English State from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. 10 vols. Bath, 1832. Rpt. NY: Burt Franklin, 1964. Vol. 6.
• Lee, Harriet. The Mysterious Marriage, or The Heirship of Roselva. A Play, in Three Acts. London: Robinson, 1798.
• Napier, Elizabeth R. "Harriet Lee." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 39, pt. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1985.
• Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford: OUP, 1993.