Chawton House Library: Women's Novels – serie

Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh’s literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott’s. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England’s economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.

Elizabeth Ham's 1845 novel, The Ford Family in Ireland, provides a snapshot, based on the personal experiences of the author, of a pivotal period in that country’s history. It examines the state of Ireland following the failed rebellions of 1798 and 1803 with a focus on the uprising of the “Thrashers,” an agrarian society in Ireland, and their putting down by martial law. Such movements attempted to avenge the wrongs which they perceived were being carried out against the natives of Ireland by landowners and the English government. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of literature and Irish history.

Theodora, A Novel by Dorothea Du Bois, published in 1770, is an entertaining and frequently shocking tale of a young woman’s efforts to regain her position in high society after her aristocratic father’s abandonment of and denial of marriage to her mother. The two-volume work is a thinly-veiled fictionalisation of Du Bois’s eventful personal history and the novel represents just one prong of what was a very public campaign to assert what she believed was her rightful place among the nobility of Ireland and Britain. Central to the narrative of Theodora is the powerlessness of women in the face of a system, moral, social and legal, that was designed to enshrine and protect patriarchal interests. In this manner Theodora exposes the gross injustices of eighteenth century society. This scholarly edition of Du Bois’s novel introduces readers to a unique voice in women’s writing of the eighteenth century that has been undeservedly dismissed by literary history for far too long.

This ground-breaking nineteenth-century volume is of considerable scholarly interest as an example of a femino-centric popular novel. Celia in Search of a Husband is a high-spirited and entertaining example of an anti-Jacobin novel, written at the height of the backlash against female intellectuals during the Napoleonic wars. Despite this hostile climate, the author sought to acknowledge the importance of female education and independence whilst at the same time endorsing the traditional Christian teaching that a wife should be subordinate to her husband. Although second wave feminists prioritized the progressive writers with whom they more readily identified, more recent scholarship has rightly paid close attention to conservative or moralist writers such as Miss Byron and recognized how influential they were. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this edition of Celia in Search of a Husband contributes to this scholarship on the literary history of women’s writing, and will be a welcome to those with a particularly interest in women’s writing, satiric novels and spoofs, and Jane Austen.

This new edition of the British epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton examines the theme of female agency, and is an excellent example of women's writing in the eighteenth-century. The relationships of the author, Phebe Gibbes, with the East India Company, The London Magazine, ‘The Benevolent Society’, and the Royal Literary Society provide rich avenues for research. Accompanied by a new introduction and editorial commentary, this text will be of great interest to students of literary history and women's writing.

Mary Charlton's 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and indulgence in and ridicule of sentimental tropes. Written in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) and Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Rosella belongs to a large class of comic works in which female readers and novelists are satirized. This edition not only addresses the gap in knowledge about Charlton’s work, but will be of particular interest to scholars working on the Romantic literary market of the 1790s, especially Minerva Press publications. The book engages with many of the themes explored in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, from women’s writing and female education to popular fiction and sensibility. Accompanied by a new introduction by Professor Natalie Neill, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary history.

Family Annals, or the Sisters, Mary Hays's last novel, was originally published in 1817. This philosophically complex novel examines the themes of the importance of women's education, economic equality of the sexes, and general equality among all human beings. This edition of Family Annals, with a new introduction and editorial commentary by Li-ching Chen, will be of interest to scholars and students of the writing of the Romantic and Victorian eras. It will contribute to various debates about women's education in the nineteenth century, and will provide a new avenue of research in women's writing.

What Has Been, originally published in 1801, is an affecting, lively, and accessible read for scholars and students of the long eighteenth century. This critical edition includes an extensive introduction, notes, and appendices. Eliza Kirkham Mathews’ portrait of a struggling female novelist connects and also distinguishes What Has Been from novels by now-canonical female authors of this period. Simultaneously, it provides a new vantage-point for assessing obscure or long-forgotten novels. This volume will be of great interest to teachers and scholars of the long-eighteenth century and Romantic era, and on such far-ranging topics as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, British Romanticism, feminism, women’s literature, the gothic, and the ‘novel of purpose’ or Jacobin/anti-Jacobin novel.

The Abbey of Clugny itself is a formulaic novel, using misattributions of identity, disguises, and alternative identities to make up for an often-lackluster plot. While such a description is hardly a glowing endorsement of the text, one corrective a critical edition of the novel could offer is to provide a character list to help readers track these various character names and identities. The novel centers around a young man alternately known as Alexis de Wielbourg, the Marquis de St. Cernin and Alphonso, who as an infant was mysteriously delivered into the care of the Baron Wielbourg. On the eve of marriage to his adopted sister, the Baron’s niece Alphonsine, Alexis’s supposed father, the Duke de Longueville, discovers he is still living and brings him back to Paris. Over the course of the novel, Alexis’s true parentage is revealed, through a series of coincidental encounters with various parties who slowly unravel the mystery of his birth. In the intervening sections of the narrative, Alexis and his compatriots visit the eponymous Abbey of Clugny, located just outside of Souvigny, which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of its recently-deceased Abbess. Borrowing the popularity of Ann Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural,” the ghosts that appear in the novel are almost immediately revealed to the reader as fraudulent, suggesting Meeke’s discomfort with the idea of true belief in ghosts. The narrator’s attitude toward religion—particularly Catholicism—and French politics and culture more broadly are ambivalent and complex throughout the text. The critical introduction will offer some context based on what is known about Meeke’s travels in France to help situate the reader within the text.

Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Bury née Campbell (1775–1861) is one of the most influential and least understood women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century. Her landmark text, The Divorced, has been out of circulation in the UK for almost two centuries; this new edition redefines her work not as silver-fork fiction but as matrimonial reform literature, and resituates the novel within the early nineteenth-century historical contexts that produced it. The introduction and scholarly notes trace Bury’s political response during the 1810s to the public persecution of Princess Caroline of Brunswick (1768–1821) by her estranged husband, an affair which significantly heightened women’s anxieties about their legal and financial security. Firm connections are established also between The Divorced and the writings of early-feminist orator Anna Doyle Wheeler (1780–1848) — one of the several contemporary campaigners who harnessed progressive literature of all modes to their political cause. Discussed alongside publications in 1831-32 by the radical Unitarian activist Harriet Taylor-Mill (1807– 58) is the contribution Bury’s novel made to the endeavours of Caroline Norton (1808–77), an admirer of Wollstonecraft whose circle included Mary Shelley and Wheeler’s daughter, Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1802-1882). In 1837 Bury challenged the abuses of a culture which permitted separated and divorced women to be dispossessed not only of their status and reputation, but of their children. She deliberately pricked the public conscience by dramatising notorious criminal conversation cases of the 1820s and 1830s, confronting also the seismic erosions of widowed and divorced women’s property rights which had been passed into law between 1811 and 1833. Driven by her concern for family, friends and women who experienced problematic marriage in wider society, Bury embedded her radical message within the conventions of the roman–à-clef to extend the appeal and reach of her novel. She also used immersive narrative not only to increase women’s awareness of their legal vulnerability but to inaugurate the broken-marriage genre under cover of the moral-domestic fictional mode. Throughout the 1830s she strove to change the moral standards of an unequal and unjust culture and arguably exerted a material influence, through fiction, upon the outcome of contemporary political campaigns to achieve legislative change. An invaluable resource for scholars of women’s history and literature in 19th century Britain.

This edition connects four female writers from two different countries, presenting the English translations of two of the most popular eighteenth-century French novels and a sequel to one of them.

Ann Gomersall’s The Citizen (1790) is an epistolary novel, written over two volumes. Gomersall came out of the merchant class in Leeds and little else is known about her, but she began writing to raise funds for her merchant husband to re-enter business after he lost his money. This is the first modern critical edition of Gomersall’s work.

Published in 1763, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville was Frances Brooke’s first and most successful novel. This modern critical edition contains an introductory essay on the text, endnotes and textual variants as well as appendices containing contemporary reviews and some of Brooke’s other writing.

This is the first modern scholarly edition of Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (1818). Owenson's seventh novel, it is the most sophisticated of her four 'national tales'. Owenson combined conventional romance plotlines with the political and social problems in Ireland, following the passing of the Act of Union in 1800.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most popular and versatile writers of the eighteenth century. The two novellas in this edition – The Rash Resolve (1724) and Life’s Progress (1748) – show her developing and adapting her ideas on the subject of passion and romance. Though superficially presented as cautionary tales, Haywood introduces a feminist slant.

Born in Dublin into the Anglo-Irish gentry, Anna Maria Hall moved to London when she was fifteen where she became famous for her books, plays and travel writing. It was her book, Sketches of Irish Character (1829) which made her a household name. This modern critical edition is based on Hall's third, revised edition of 1844.

Thomas Holcroft’s 1786 translation of Isabelle de Montolieu’s novel is a textual encounter between a rather conventional Swiss woman and a British radical. Just as Montolieu did in her own translations, Holcroft reworked parts of the novel to make it more appealing to his intended audience.

Self-Control (1811) was a literary sensation, going into four editions in its first year. The first novelist to set her story against a strong Scottish background, Brunton set the scene for other writers such as Walter Scott. Jane Austen was also a fan, she read it at least twice, worrying that the work might foreshadow her own creations.

Interest in the work of Eliza Haywood has increased greatly over the last two decades. Though much scholarship is focused on her ‘scandalous’ early career, this critical edition of The Invisible Spy (1755) adds to the canon of her later, more sophisticated work.

The Victim of Fancy was first published in December 1787 and, despite favourable reviews, has not been published since. Cook's new scholarly edition of this forgotten novel will be of paramount importance in allowing new insights into the form of the sentimental novel as it actually existed in the 1780s, and not as it is often perceived.

Whilst an important and under-researched example of women's writing, scholars of Romanticism and the nineteenth century will also find much value in this challenging political satire.

Ned Evans is a rags-to-riches hero, whose early existence in poverty in Wales is dramatically changed when he saves the beautiful Lady Cecilia Rivers from an assault and is invited to Ireland by her father. After spending time with the great and the good of Irish society, Ned travels to America where his fortunes once more reverse.

This edition of Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810) is the first modern scholarly publication of what is arguably Green's most famous novel. As with many of her other works, Green adopts numerous sophisticated methods to parody her contemporaries.

This critical edition of Julia is the first modern printing of a novel that blends the character development of a poet with critical reflections on social injustice.

First published in 1759, this novel aims to promote the cause of the Magdalen House, a charity which sought to rehabilitate prostitutes by fitting them for a life of virtuous industry. It challenges long-standing prejudices against prostitutes by presenting them as victims of inadequate education, male libertinism and sexual double standards.

Some of the theories Genlis adopts in the education of the eponymous children have their roots in Rousseau's "Emile". However, Genlis herself suggested that Rousseau knew little of the practical education of children. This work is placed within the context of the late eighteenth-century debate on female education.

Contains two tales - "The Renunciation", which presents a colourful picture of life abroad, when an English girl travels to Italy in search of kin and supports herself as an artist, offering an early feminist heroine; and, "The Hermitage", a psychological thriller involving a ruined country maiden and an unsolved murder.

A novel that helps you understand the British reaction to Corinne as well as of its cultural, social and gender implications.

A novel, which addresses central themes of adultery, obsession and inheritance. It follows the fortunes of Matilda Melbourne who displays virtue, delicacy and an unwavering commitment to the sometimes ruthless demands of parental authority.