SHORE, MEHITABEL (1778-1846), novelist, born at Boston (q.v.), author of six novels, and the creator of the proverbial Shore heroine, whose good sense has been more generally commended than closely read. Her books are The Cousin's Visit (1806), A House in Common (1811), The Better Offer (1816), Mrs. Pell's Winter (1822), The Absent Partner (1829), and The Last Invitation (1835). They concern the manners of a commercial society which possesses enough leisure to misunderstand itself, but not enough money to make misunderstanding harmless.
The early novel retains the explanatory confidante and the convenient letter of its predecessors. By A House in Common these expedients have become unnecessary. Two sisters, their widowed aunt, and a cousin who pays irregularly for his rooms occupy a house which all consider their own. No one disputes its title. Every one disputes the daily exercise of possession: which room may be lent, which visitor entertained, who must move when an invalid requires quiet. The plot advances by arrangements made before the person most affected by them has come downstairs. A domestic order becomes visible through its exceptions.
The Better Offer is her most perfect comedy. Its heroine receives two proposals and rejects the one whose advantages she can enumerate. Shore withholds the decisive conversation, giving instead the altered account of it offered by each listener at the next gathering. The reader must decide what was said from what people need to believe was said. There is no authorial wink to relieve him of the labour. The happy conclusion depends upon an admission of error which costs the heroine more than the loss of the better income would have cost her.
Mrs. Pell's Winter has been less widely liked. Its central woman is neither marriageable nor particularly agreeable, and her attempts to keep her place among younger acquaintances are sometimes painful to watch. It contains, nevertheless, Shore's finest sustained dialogue: a succession of calls during which the old lady offers the same news to different visitors, changing only the circumstance which makes herself necessary to it. Sympathy grows from repetition, where a less patient writer would have manufactured it from a misfortune.
The Absent Partner extends the household into the counting-house. Its ship remains beyond the horizon, while credit, confidence, and courtship change places ashore. The Last Invitation, slighter in action, is her severest book; reconciliation is achieved without the recovery of an old intimacy. These are not the conclusions of a novelist who supposed that prudence could prevent loss. Prudence in Shore is the ability to recognise a loss without charging it to the wrong person.
Her debt to Gale (q.v.) is audible in the dry qualifications of her prose, but the distinction is substantial. His essay brings a company before a judge; her company contains several judges, each of whom is evidence against the others. The circulating libraries (q.v.) have kept her books in use without giving them the clamorous popularity of historical romance. She died in 1846. The Shore heroine survives in conversation as a woman who knows what to do; in the novels she is more interesting, being a woman who learns how much she did not know. (H. M.)