Women Novelists and the
French Revolution Debate:
Novelizing the Revolution1
Revolutionizing the Novel
Gary Kelly
I
t is now accepted that the French Revolution was a culhurll as well
as political event, or rather that Revolutionary politics were enacted
in cultural ways, among others.' Yet fictionalizations of the Revolution
might still seem either tangential to its political realities or a submission
of literature, which is supposedly transhistorical, to mere temporality,
in the form of propaganda. In fact much writing of the time remains
outside the modem literary canon for precisely this reason."ven
critical
opinion of the time saw the novel as an unpromising vehicle for serious
discussion of political ideas, let alone ideas inspired by an event that was
considered historically unprecedented in its magnitude, consequences,
and nature. Moreover, the novel was then widely if erroneously regarded
as a "feminine" form, mainly read and written by women, and as a
consequence outside the public, political sphere in which revolutions
1 See for example Lynn Hunt, Politic8, Culture, and C l m in the French Revolution (Berkeley:
Universily of California Ress. 1984).
2 See Harriet Kramer Linkin, 'The Current Canon in Blitish Romantics Studits," College English
5 3 5 (Sept. 1991). 548-70.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION. Volume 6.Number 4. July 1994
370
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
FICTION
o ~ c u r r e d On
. ~ the other hand, the polarization of the political and the
literary that underwrites such judgments originated in reaction to the
Revolution, and was part of an elevation of the literary over the political
that masks its own political character and the political character of art. It
could also be argued, after Mikhail Bakhtin, that "novelization," or the
creation of a polyvocal, democratic, dialogical discursive order in place
of authoritative, authoritarian, monological ones, was the project both of
the Revolution and the novel.'
Thus fictionalizing Revolutionary themes and issues, whether directly
or indirectly, would be a way of participating in the Revolution. Furthermore, the subordinate cultural status of the novel and its female
writers and readers would make it apt for "novelizing" the literary and
discursive order of the time, by introducing the marginal into the centre. Though novels were in fact produced and read equally by women
and men, albeit with different inflections, there were cultural grounds for
characterizing the novel as "feminine," accounting for its potential as oppositional discourse. By the nature of its claims, the Revolution not only
invited "novelizing"-in Bakhtin's sense and as novelistic representation
of Revolutionary events, characters, and ideas; the Revolution also enabled and even required revolutionizing of the novel, thematically and
formally, in order that it might cany out these tasks.
More important, by the outbreak of the Revolution certain k i d s of
novel had long been implicated in the cultural, social, and political
critique that the Revolution embodied. Since the seventeenth century,
at least, certain kinds of prose fiction had dealt with private relationships and domestic scenes of life. The domestic or feminine sphere
was represented as authentic in contrast to the illusions and relativities
of the masculine or public sphere, especially under court government,
thereby making domestic fiction into oppositional writing. Varieties of
anti-romance represented "reality" in a different set of modes to counter
courtly culture, including picaresque low life, satire exposing courtly artifice, and the knowingly super-courtly, or decadent. These kinds of fiction,
like those representing private and domestic life, were anti-courtly simply by implying that "reality" and "authenticity" lay elsewhere than at
court. The same ideological and cultural work could be accomplished by
both The English Rogue (1665-71) and La Princesse de Clbves (1678, in
3 See John TInnon Taylor. Early Opposition m fhe English Novel: The PopuhrReoetim fmm 1760
to 1830 (New Y o k King's Crown Ress, 1943).
4 Mikhail M. Bakhtin. The Dinlogical ImgiMn'on: Four E r s q s , 4.
Michael Holquist, uans.
Catyl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas hess, 1981).
REVOLUTIONIZING THE NOVEL 371
English 1679), and by both The New Atlantis (1709) and Moll Flanders
(1722).
These varieties of fiction were modifed in the middle third of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment theorists proposed models of "civil society" to revolutionize the public and political sphere by removing it from
court hegemony and imbuing it with the values and practices of the progressive upper and middle classes? Prose fiction was again an apt vehicle
for the dissemination of these models, especially the novel of manners.
It represented "manners" as two distinct, interpenetrating, but also conflicting practices-a courtly code of social exclusivity and emulation and
a middle-class code of ethical conduct based on disciplined subjectivity
and professionalized domesticity. The "Richardsonian revolution" developed an intense and subtle representation of subjectivity and domesticity
assailed by court culture and its emulators. The "Fieldingesque revolution" adapted the quixote and mock-epic traditions to a similar end. Both
modified bourgeois subjectivity and domesticity with elements of gentry
(and genteel) culture, while others, such as Sterne, celebrated subjectivity and domesticity in a frame of courtly knowingness that together
imply a dialectic of bourgeois and genteel manners.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, these varieties of the
"modern novel" (so called to distinguish it from the earlier types) commonly show the protagonist asserting her or his moral and ethical identity
against a hegemonic order of paternalism, patriarchy, and patronage,
while seeking the profession andor mate necessary to validate this identity before society. Gender difference was of course an important aspect
of the ideological and cultural work of such novels, but it was articulated
with differences of class and, less often, of race. For though the protagonist of these novels is usually a young woman, male readers could read
themselves into the heroine and her plight as a gender-transposed version of their own situation in relation to the hegemonic order. This plot is
certainly ideologically ambiguous, representing that order for both warning and instruction of those marginalized by it and who thus resent yet
desire it.
By the late eighteenth century, however, many in the novel-reading
classes were becoming more critical of the hegemonic order and more
confident in their own social identity, values, and practices. This shift in
5 For a Raent survey of the development of ideas of "civil society" fmm classical antiquity to
the twentieth century, set lean L. Cohcn and Andrew Arm, CivilSocicry andPoliticn1 Theory
(Cambridge and London: hUl' Ress, 1992). cspucially chaps 2 and 3.
372 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
attitude is seen in the increasing emphasis on subjectivity in the novelindeed, in literature and culture generally, forming the movement known
as Sensibility. "TN~"subjectivity is represented in sentimental novels
and tales as the accumulated moral and intellectual capital necessary
in middle-class life, and the public, political sphere is more vigorously
attacked as the domain of court culture. Since Enlightenment historiography and political theory traced this culture to feudal origins and found
analogies to it in contemporary court-dominated societies such as those
in the Orient and Roman Catholic Europe, novelists extended their formalization of class conflict to earlier times and farther places, in "Gothic"
and proto-historical "romances."
The French Revolution recontextualized these novel forms and themes,
as it did much else. To middle-class observers the events of the summer
of 1789-the revolt of the tiers brat, the attack on the Bastille, the abolition of feudal privileges and passing of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen-seemed to end the court system that marginalized
them. But the attack on Versailles in October 1789 and successive political and economic crises during 1790 and 1791 raised doubts about
the ability of Revolutionary leaders to sustain reform whiie keeping control from middle-class and plebeian extremists. These doubts intensified
in 1792 with the overthrow of the monarchy, the war against counterRevolutionary powers, and the September Massacres, and seemed confirmed with the Jacobin coup d'btat against the moderate Girondin government in the spring of 1793 and the subsequent Terror. To many, the
early Revolution had seemed an admirable coalition of upper and middleclass reformers, the Girondii-led Revolution had seemed more radical but
still an expression of middle-class aspirations, and the Jacobii Revolution
seemed a descent into "mob-rule." Moreover, the Guondin-led Revolution was represented as a feminization of politics and the public sphere,
stressing the values of egalitarian conjugality and community, whereas
the Jacobii Revolution was represented as a brutal remasculinization of
politics and public life. This gendering of Revolutionary movements subsumed pre-Revolutionary self-characterizationsof the middle-class as the
virtuous female resisting both decadent courtly seducers and brutal pleb5an violators-characterizations widely familiar to the middle classes,
partly thanks to novels.
The anti-Jacobii coup of Thermidor 1794 and establishment of the Directory did not fully revive sympathy for the Revolution. The Directory
(1795-99), seeming to combiie the mcien rbgime's courtly decadence
and the bourgeoisie's greed and self-interest, became notorious for moral
REVOLUTIONIZING THE NOVEL 373
licence, cultural extravagance, and rampant commercialism. Bonaparte's
rise appealed to many as a return to commanding leadership and a system
open to merit. French military expansionism soon lost much of that sympathy, however, and the Revolution again seemed a masculinist denial
of the feminized values of social harmony, order, and prosperity. Bonaparte's taste for courtly display and the sexual and political intrigues at his
court seemed evidence that the Revolution had again assumed the worst
traits of the ancien rigime. Middle-class Britons took a similar view of
aristocratic decadence and political mismanagement at home, contrasting them with the patriotic war of Spaniards and Portuguese against the
French. Yet the fall of Napoleon created further divisions, being treated
by most Britons in a spirit of nationalistic triumphalism but deplored by
some as another reverse for feminized bourgeois values.
While the Revolution was widely viewed in terms of gender difference,
Romantic culture emerged as a remasculinization of culture designed to
provide a new basis for the move to the hegemony of the middle classes.
The pre-Revolutionary feminized culture of Sensibility was increasingly
denounced during the 1790s as a source of Revolutionary transgression
and insubordination. Revolutionary feminism, too, criticized sensibility,
hut was widely regarded as a manifestation of what it condemned. Romantic culture disdained sentimentalism while reformulating Sensibility's
technologies of the self, domestic ideology, and localism, now more
strongly associated with the extra-social domain of Nature, clearly reconstructed as a refuge from Revolution. The tendency to "read" the
Revolution in terms of gender difference was redirected in Romantic
culture by displacing gendered politics into ostensibly apolitical cultural
discourses and social spheres. Finally, Romanticism appropriated the initiatives of women writers, who had been attempting to enter the public
and political domain from their conventionally accepted domains of expertise in subjectivity, domesticity, and maintenance of the local social
fabric.
44
.
How were these complex political and cultural developments realized in
the novel, and why did the novel, especially women's novels, become
important in the Revolution debate?
The nature of the Revolution inevitably made writing a major field of
political struggle, if only because most of those who were interested in
the progress of the Revolution would have had little or no direct contact with it. For them, the Revolution was always mediated, represented.
374 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
But such representation was inherently unable to render the totality of the
Revolutionary experience and was subject to discursive orders and institutions inherited from the ancien regime. Inevitably, the Revolution was
a kind of fiction. Moreover, the Revolution was perceived as a breach
of the prevailing political and discursive order, challenging political,
social, and cultural understanding and producing intense political gossip and rumour. Indeed, Revolutionary governments regarded spreading
such "fictions" as a threat to public security. Meanwhile, various preRevolutionary historical, political, religious, social, and cultural schemes
were used to explain this new phenomenon and to help predict its course.
Yet Revolutionary disruption of the discursive order undermined the confidence of readers and writers in the ability of such schemes to accomplish
these tasks. Accordingly, the Revolution was followed and debated intensely in a paper war exploiting all genres and often transgressing the
discursive order to represent the Revolution as a new reality. This discursive instability and excess could be regarded as novelization in Bakhtin's
sense-pluralizing, relativizing, and democratizing what had been a centred, hierarchical, authoritarian, and monological order of meaning. Such
a process affected writing produced during the Revolution and dealing directly or indirectly with it, as well as writing produced before the
Revolution and now read in the light of it.
One result was an opportunity for women writers and "their" genrethe novel-to intervene in the public and political sphere from which both
had long been excluded. As Olympe de Gouges in France and Mary Wollstonecraft in Britain warned in their polemical writings, leaving women
out of the Revolution endangered it, for without a stake in the Revolution women might go over to the middle classes' historic enemies, who
were now the enemies of their Revolution.6 Most women writers were
not as bold as Gouges and Wollstonecraft, however, for any writing directly or indirectly forensic implied a public identity considered improper
for a woman. But in other kinds of writing, especially the belles-letfres,
women could treat the Revolution in terms allowed to them, such as
the domestic affections and social sympathy. The novel especially, with
its emphasis on subjective experience in private life, usually pretended
to depict only the private aspects or consequences of public and political affairs, and such references could be justified as necessary touches
of realism.
6 Mary Wollstonwraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Wornon,ed. Carol Poston. 2nd ed. (New
Yo& W.W. Nomn. 1988). p. 4.
REVOLUTIONIZINO THE NOVEL 375
By 1792 the Revolution debate was entering these genres in a significant way, but this in turn produced a backlash. In France the Jacobins launched scumlous attacks against "female politicians" such as
Marie Roland and Gouges. In Britain writers such as William Gifford and Thomas James Mathias attacked both Revolutionary feminists and pre-Revolutionary writers of feminized Sensibility, such as the
"Della Cmscans," as causes and manifestations of revolutionary disorder. Women writers themselves began to join these denunciations, though
this meant contributing to what they condemned. By the late 1790s most
pro-Revolutionary voices, male or female, had been silenced. Yet postRevolutionary issues of internal social conflict and control and national
and imperial self-defence could be adapted to "feminine" concerns and
genres even more readily than the Revolution debate, and used to promote ostensibly apolitical subjective experience and domestic and local
life as the bases for social harmony and order and a national identity and
mission.
Marie-France Silver, in "Le Roman ferninin des annCes r6volutionnaires," follows this political-literary trajectory by showing how women
novelists in France responded to the Revolution debate in diverse but
mostly oblique ways. For example, Olympe de Gouges's Le Prince
philosophe was published in 1792, a year after she published her
Ddclaration &s dmits de la femme et de la citoyenne, but the novel was
in fact written in 1788 in a form of Enlightenment conre philosophique
rather than being a fiction directly inspired by and referring to the Revolution. Nevertheless, Silver argues, merely by publishing the novel Gouges
made a feminist and political statement. At this time politically active but
coming under increasing attack from anti-feminist Revolutionary journalists, "Gouges affirme sa participation la Republique des Lettres
au moment m&me oil par son action politique elle assume son rBle de
citoyenne" (pp. 309-10). Moreover, Gouges has her character Idam& address to the fictional king and his ministers a pdcis of Gouges's own
feminist views as enunciated in the Dt?claration,thus implying a continuity between pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment critique and Revolutionary
action. Of course., French women intellectuals in the early 1790s had be€ 0 them,
~
in Marie Roland, the example of a woman actually leading the
Revolution, though from the decorously feminine position as the wife of
a leading Girond'in politican and government minister. As her husband's
unacknowledged political secretary, she produced important public statements on the events of the early 1790s. and her shadow may be seen
in Gouges's Idam6e. Significantly, Gouges turned from the novel to the
376 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
theatre as a more immediate and, in the French political situation (with
action centred in Paris), a more direct channel of political influence.
During the mid and late 1790s, the failure of the Girondin Revolution, the Jacobin Terror, and the decadence of the Directory drove
many middle-class reformers to abandon Revolutionary sympathy. Many
women writers and intellectuals, in France and elsewhere, were especially alienated by what they saw as the brutal masculinism of the
Jacobin regime and the coualy masculinism of the Directory, and they resented Revolutionary warnings to women to refrain from politics and
raise good republican children. Novelists, both men and women, returned to pre-Revolutionary sentimental fiction, representing alternatives
to Revolutionary ideals and action in subjective and domestic experience. Isabelle de CharriBre did set her two novels of the mid-1790s.
Lettres tmuvbs dans des portefeuilles d'dmigris (1793) and Tmisfemmes
(1795). among French political exiles, but her emphasis is on personal relations and scenes of domestic society. According to Silver, three of the
greatest successes of the sentimental novel appeared in the 1790s; Mme
de Flahaut's Adde de S d m g e (1794) and Sophie Cottin's Claire d'Albe
(1799) refuse to allow "les bvbnements extbrieurs s'immiscer dans la fiction" (p. 317), while Mme de Genlis's Les V a t u tdmdraires (1799) makes
it clear that the Revolution takes a secondary place to the story of private lives. Yet these were also ways of writing "political romances" in
new terms. For example, Charri&rersnovels avoid mere nostalgia by rejecting certain sentimental conventions, presenting characters who are
political refugees, discussing topics that interested Revolutionaries of
the Girondin circle, and advocating conciliation between peoples of different nationalities, then at war. According to Silver, then, these novels
comprise "me mUitation ininterrompue sur la R6volution Eranqaise et
ses consbquences" @p. 312-13). Similarly, both Flahaut and Cottin suggest that their novels offer refuge from the bitter political realities of the
mid-1790s-a task as political as any other.
No doubt women novelists in France were vulnerable to political distractions, disruptions, and diversions that did not have the same immediacy and force for their counterparts in Britain. Yet the work of the latter
in novelizing the Revolution developed in similar ways and followed a
similar trajectory, and, because they were removed from the immediate scene of Revolution, they were more deliberate and diverse in doing
SO.
l k o prominent English novelists of the 1790s who carried forward the
radical potential of Sensibility were Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Inchbald. Smith, a leadiig poet and emergent novelist of Sensibility during
REVOLUTIONIZING THE NOVEL 377
the 1780s (Elegiac Sonnets, 1784; Emmeline, 1788), incorporated Revolutionary themes and allusions in several novels of the early 1790s, such
as Desmond (1792) and The Banished Man (1794). Yet with Ethelinde
(1790), The Old Manor House (1793). and even her novels with direct
political reference she remained primarily a novelist of sensibility in extremis, in the line of courtly novels of feeling, the abM Wvost, Samuel
Richardson, Frances Sheridan, and Sophia Lee. Inchbald's partly autobiographical novel A Simple Story, begun in the 1780s or late 1770s, often
revised, and published in 1791, contains no direct reference to Revolutionary topics yet was received by her reformist friends as a contribution
to the Revolution debate. Her next novel, Nature and Art, experiments
with fusing the sentimental tale and social and institutional satire, and,
though it too refrains from direct reference to the Revolution and was
ready for publication in 1794, it was condemned by Inchbald's counterRevolutionary friends, and she was warned that it could open her to
political harassment, if not prosecution. It was not published until 1796
and was condemned by counter-revolutionary reviewers.?
Helen Maria Williams, the leading eyewitness reporter on the Revolution for British readers through three decades, novelized the Revolution
and her experience of it in particularly diverse ways. As a leading sentimental poet in England in the 1780s. she was well positioned to develop
new ways of novelizing and thus feminizing the Revolution and politics in the 1790s. Her first novel, Julia (1790). does not deal with the
Revolution, but is a fictional version of the cultural and social politics of the proto-revolutionary Della Cmscan group of British poets,
some of whom quickly took up the cause of the Revolution. Soon after writing Julia, Williams left for Paris, eventually settled there, and
did not publish another novel. But she did publish a series of books describing major events and characters of the Revolution and interpreting
its significance for readers in Britain and America. Here Williams applied the rhetoric of Sensibility to a sustained feminization of politics.
L i e most of the French women novelists discussed earlier, Williams was
an admirer of the feminized Giondin Revolution, and a member of the
Rolands' salon. Though she wrote no Revolutionary novels, she did include in each of her surveys a narrative, supposedly based on facts,
exemplifying the effect of successive stages of the Revolution on domains conventionally allowed to women, especially subjectivity and the
domestic affections. Each story is presented in language and structure
7 Gary Kelly. 'The English Jncobin Novel 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendoa FTess. 1976), chap. 2.
378 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
very similar to those of sentimental tales; Williams actually draws attention to the narratives' novelistic qualities; and several were pirated for
sale as sensational novellas.
Williams novelized the revolution in other ways, too. During the mid1790s, after the fall of her friends the Girondins and the rise of what
she regarded as the excessively masculinist Jacobin regime, she departed
temporarily from her journalistic accounts of the Revolution to publish
a translation of Bemardin de St Pierre's pre-Revolutionary sentimental
tale, Paul et Virginie. But like the publishing of sentimental novels by
Flahaut, Cottin, and Genlis, this was a political act. Williams makes it
clear in her preface that the Jacobin Terror compelled her to keep to
"mere" translation, as a pastime while imprisoned by that regime. In this
way she repoliticizes St Pierre's work. After the fall of Napoleon, whom
Williams first admired as the embodiment of the "feminine" Revolution
and then despised as another masculinization of it, she aimed for a similar
result with a translation in 1817 of Xavier de Maistre's Le Lipreux de la
cite'd'Aoste (181 I).%
The work of Flahaut, Cottin, and Genlis, Smith, Inchbald, and Williams
shows that d i i c t reference to the Revolution was not necessary to effect
novelistic intervention in the Revolution debate. Indeed, many readers
came to expect Revolutionary references in novels of the day, as Frances
Bumey discovered when she published Camilla in 1796. She had, after
all, held office at the court of George nr, and married a French emigre'
aristocrat who had sat in the republican National Convention. But she
had to insist to a correspondent that "Politics were, all ways, left out"
of her new novel, though she admitted that she had considered bringing
them in, apparently to counter such work by other novelists. She also
half-acknowledged that in leaving politics out she was being political in
a different way, since if Camilla were "to be at all generally read, it
would be a better office to general Readers to carry them wide of all
politics, to their domestic firesides, than to open new matter of endless
debate."9 Bumey did fictionalize the Revolution directly, but not until
The Wanderer (1814attempt, by then preceded by similar efforts of
other women writers, to reconcile opposing ideologies of the Revolution
debate and its aftermath.
8 For further discussion of Williams's writing, see Gary Kelly. Wonm, Writing, and R~olufion
1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Ress, 1993). chaps 2 and 6; Mary A. Pavret, Romnnric Cormspondenec: Women. Politic$ and the Fiction of Lcncrs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993). chap. 3.
9 The Joumolr andLcttcrr of Fonny Burney, ed. kyce Hemlow with Wtricia Boutilk and Althea
Douglas 3 vols (Oxford: Clamdon Ress, l973), 3:186.
R E V O L U T l O N l Z I N G THE NOVEL 379
Burney was reacting in part against a form of novel known as "the
political romance," created by members of William Godwin's circle, including Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft (Anna St. Ives, 1792; Hugh
Trevor, 1794-97). Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796; The
Victim of Prejudice, 1799). Mary Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman;
or, Maria, 1798). and Eliza Fenwick (Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock,
1795). and with associates such as the Midlands paper manufacturer
Robert Bage (Man As He Is, 1792; Hemprong; or, Man As He Is Not,
1796). These writers aimed to seize the novel from what they saw as its
service to courtly ideology, and to disseminate their own "philosophy"by that time a term signifying critique of the ancien rigime. The novelistic practice of most members of the Godwin circle was based on
materialist or "necessitarian" Enlightenment philosophy, especially as
reformulated by Godwin, with crucial assistance from Holcroft, in his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1794).
Godwin argues that individual subjectivity is formed for good or for ill
by the social reality of the time, especially the system of government. If
this system were inherently corrupting-4odwin thought any system was
s e t h e n all individuals in the society would be corrupted. This "necessary" consequence could only be altered by a revolution-for Godwin,
a revolution in consciousness, multiplied in many individuals and eventually the entire society, through "the spread of truth." How exactly
this was to occur, especially under repressive regimes, remained unclear.
But since fiction was widely read, it could contribute much to this nonviolent revolutionary process. Since the novel specialized in individual
cases and appealed to imagination rather than reason, it could also illustrate the general argument while arousing the passionate interest of
readers, most of whom were untrained in philosophy. Thus Godwinian
novels narrate the formation of individual character by circumstance,
the errors into which such characters are necessarily led, their awakening to the realities of injustice and oppression, and their eventual move
to liberation, successful or not. Similarly, such novels use first-person
narration to show how individual experience and subjectivity furnish evidence for the injustice and power of the hegemonic order, yet constitute
the only site for initiating the overthrow of that order.
In this respect, the novels by women in the Godwin circle go further
than those of the men. Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage rely on coincidence to enable the individual to break the ideological domination of the
hegemonic order. But the women novelists, especially Hays and Wollstonecraft, show that the condition of oppression will (at least in a few
380 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
"superior beings") produce such abjection that consciousness must be
politicized as a result. This argument was based on the feminist position
of these writeretheir critique of both the hegemonic order and the order proposed to replace it, for they argue that both orders subordinate
women. In their novels Hays and Wollstonecraft have difficulty imagining how this double bind is to be resolved, but they do posit a legacy
of liberation through writing. Their novels of the 1790s present autobiographical narratives of oppression, inevitable enlightenment, and partial
resolutions-left as lessons for the next generation-and this prospectively revolutionizing power within the stories is presumably parallelled
by the power of the novels in contemporary society and with posterity.
The work of Inchbald, Hays, and Wollstonecraft called forth from a
few women novelists explicit rejections of Revolutionary feminism. In
the early and mid-1790s Jane West attacked the courtization of women
but also, less directly, challenged elements of Revolutionary feminism
(The Advantages of Education, 1793; A Gossip's Story, 1796). As the
Revolution debate was dwindling she published a duect attack on "English Jacobiinism," including Revolutionary feminism, in A Tale of the
limes (1799). Elizabeth Hamilton's first novel, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), popularizes and fictionalizes anti-courtly Enlightenment ideas
circulating in her brother's circle of colonial reformers and combines it
with a satirical attack on the patronage system and courtly values of preRevolutionary Britain. But the novel also contains a burlesque of Revolutionary feminism. In her second novel, Memoirs of Modem Philosophers
(1800). Hamilton focuses on this theme, attacking the Godwin circle and
caricaturing Mary Hays. Paradoxically, in opposing women's novelistic
interventions in the Revolution debate, West and Hamilton themselves
transgressed gendered canons of subject matter.
West masked this paradox by developing pre-Revolutionary fictional
elements of realism in domestic and local life that removed subjective
and social meaning from the public to the private sphere. Even this
could be seen as a feminist move, however, since it elevated conventionally "feminine" spheres of knowledge, authority, and practice over those
conventionally gendered masculine. West's achievement was taken further this way by post-Revolutionary novelists from Maria Edgeworth to
Jane Austen.lo
Hamilton's novels exhibit greater contradictions. They take up forms
of fiction tong considered "masculine," including the "quixote" narrative,
10 Marilyn Butler, Jmonc Ausrcn ond rhe Wor of I&-
(Oxford: Clanndon h s s , 1975)
R E V O L U T I O N I Z I N G THE NOVEL 381
burlesque, the Lucianic satire of ideas, and the observations of a fictitious oriental visitor to Europe. They also treat discourses supposedly
barred to women because of their weaker "nature," limited education,
and restricted experience. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah fictionalizes and
thus makes available for women readers the ideas and researches of the
Orientalists around Sir William Jones, a group that included Hamilton's
brother. The Orientalists used scholarship to support a broad range of
policies designed to end the courtly system in colonial rule and thus curtail the contribution of imperial plunder to the courtly political system
in Britain. Memoirs of Modem Philosophers attacks the philosophical
sources and airs the themes of the Revolution debate more broadly and
more directly. Hamilton's fictionalization of these "masculine" discourses
and forms also exhibits her own mastery of them, thereby promoting
women's intellectual abilities and political acumen, and hence their usefulness to public and political as well as domestic society. Such claims
resemble those of the very Revolutionary feminists Hamilton attacks,
and in the Revolutionary aftermath she continued to press this line of
argument and literary practice.I1
The most popular form of the novel in the 1790s. "Gothic romance,"
was often seen as a form of exoticism offering readers escape from the
Revolution debate. Again, however, a form constructed withii the culture
of Sensibility was recontextualized and given new political potential by
the Revolution debate. Based on Enlightenment "philosophical history"
as a critique of feudal society and chivalric culture, the Gothic romance
was obviously adaptable to Revolutionary critique of the ostensibly feudal and chivalric ancien regime. Gothic elements such as omnipotent
persecutors, adventures of flight and pursuit, prisons, tribunals, ignorant
mobs, and testing of protagonists' sensibility were appropriated for political purposes by Inchbald, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Hays. Some
critics regarded even conventional Gothic romances as offering parallels
to Revolutionary horror.
This could be true even for Ann Radcliffe, the least sensational
and most respected of the Gothic novelists of the 1790s. As Kim Ian
Michasiw argues in "Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power," Radcliffe's interests are "the passions, their influence on action, and power
in its public and private manifestations." Thus "Radcliffe's gathering
concentration is on relations not between individuals in themselves but
between individuals as they are mediated or even produced by social institutions," that is, "in terms of a tripartite opposition of the individual,
11 See Kelly, Women. Writing, Md Revolution, chaps 4 and 8
382 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
society, and the state" (pp. 328-29). This distinction separates Radcliffe from Godwin, who offers the "consoling paranoid fantasy" that
"the Law" and the state exist not as autonomous institutions of power
but only as they are operated and wielded by individuals. This argument could be applied to other forms of women's fiction in this period,
and beyond, especially if "the state" here means the modem state internalized in the consciousness of the individual and thus permeating every
aspect of quotidian life.
For in the Revolutionary aftermath women found new opportunities
for using "their" genre to participate in the "matter of the Revolution."
A leading task in post-Revolutionary culture was to repair what many
saw as the rupture in social relations, national unity, cultural continuity,
and the discursive order caused by the Revolution and the Revolution
debate. Since reparation and healing were conventionally accepted as important forms of women's work, women writers were quick to exploit this
opening, especially in face of the increased resistance to women as intellectuals and writets that had emerged in the 1790s. Without seeming
to challenge post-Revolutionary culture's continuing aversion to women
in the public sphere and increasing insistence on their domestic roles
and identity, women novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter,
Lady Morgan, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Mary Shelley could engage in novelistic reconstruction
of the public sphere. They did so in terms of subjectivity and domesticity as refuges from a public sphere seen to be still dominated by courtly
culture and the patronage system, a political sphere now divided in international military and imperial struggle, and a cultural sphere increasingly
hostile to feminized discourse. But they also advanced subjectivity and
domesticity as sites and sources of a new, yet ostensibly historic, national
identity, culture, and destiny. In this work they partly rejected, partly reconstructed, and partly subsumed elements of both pre-Revolutionary
feminized Sensibility and Revolutionary feminism.
Edgeworth had direct experience of revolutionary terror during the
Irish rebellion of 1798. She created, in various forms of tale and novel
from the pseudo-popular conre to the novel of manners, fictional representations of reconciliation between every sort of social group that had
been in conflict during the Revolutionary crisis. These groups included
colonized and colonizers, regions and metropolis, men and women, different religions, different generations, different classes. Underwriting
Edgeworth's post-Revolutionary utopianizing was a comprehensive program of political, social, and cultural reform, worked out from her father's ideas, which were in turn drawn from his earlier participation in
R E V O L U T I O N I Z I N G THE N O V E L 383
circles of the English provincial Enlightenment. Influenced by her father, Edgeworth was also wary of the taint of Revolutionary feminism,
and, though she represents her female protagonists as women of reason, she also shows them leading from their "propel" sphere in domestic
and local life, and she satirizes women who aspire beyond that sphere.
Jane Porter combines elements of Gothic romance and Enlightenment
historiography in novels illustrating the culture, history, and destiny of a
particular people-not the "people" of Revolutionary slogans but one in
which social conflicts are disarmed for resistance to an outside power. In
Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803)the people are modern Poles; in The Scotfish
Chiefs (1810) they are medieval Scots; in both cases the people are
figures for contemporary Britons facing Napoleonic France. Such matter
was considered "masculine" in the gendered discursive order of the time,
but Porter feminizes her material in several ways. She emphasizes the
value of religious piety, feminizes her heroes, shows the basis of public
life in subjectivity and domesticity, and historicizes her material only to
an extent that does not intrude upon "masculine" learned discourses.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, combined elements of the Gothic romance and the novel of manners with learned "popular antiquities" (later
called folklore) to create another form of "national tale," in such novels as The Wild Irish Girl (1806). O'Donnel(1814), Florence Macarthy
(1818), and The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys (1827). Unlike Porter's
novels, these are set in contemporary or near contemporary life, use details of popular life and culture rather than broad historical fact, show
strong--even polemical-sympathy for the common people, and attack
injustice on a national scale-in this case the mistreatment by Britain of
the nearest of its colonies. Like Edgeworth, Morgan uses such detail to
create a more sympathetic and persuasive representation of a region that
had become disaffected during the Revolutionary crisis. Like Porter and
Edgeworth, Morgan represents the new model national leader as a feminized yet masculine hero in private and local life, rather than as the "great
man" on the national and international stage. Like other writers of the
Revolutionary aftermath, Morgan represents national reconciliation as romantic courtship and marriage between male and female representative
of different cultures, regions, and colonies. Anticipating Mme de SWl's
treatment of the theme in Corinne; ou, l'ltalie (1807).Morgan develops in
The Wild Irish Girl the emergent theme of woman as the repository of the
national folk culture. Significantly, the work alarmed the Anglo-Irish mling class and the British colonial administration, showing that a novel of
post-Revolutionary reconciliation could still be politically controversial.
384 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Amelia Opie novelized post-Revolutionary themes in terms of subjectivity and domesticity rather than the national culture and destiny, and by
developing the sentimental tale rather than the novel, in such works as
The Father and Daughter (1801),Adeline Mowbray (1804),Simple Tales
(1806). Temper; or, Domestic Scenes (1812). Tales of Real Life (1813).
and Valentine'sEve (1816).Her central character is often an erring daughter or wife, and her central theme is usually subjective worth misled into
transgression. In the 1790s Opie was a leading figure of the Norwich Dissenters and "English Jacobins," connected to the Godwin circle. In the
Revolutionary aftermath she developed a literary and social character of
refined femininity, and criticized Revolutionary feminism. Adeline Mowbray, in particular, fictionalizes the views and lives of Wollstonecraft and
Godwin. Opie's fiction all together illustrates a common passage from
Revolution to Romanticism by displacing public and political rebellion
onto the plane of subjectivity and domesticity. By grounding these figures of revolt in domestic and local realism, Opie retains the Godwinian
philosophy that circumstances f o m character, while obscuring this political legacy in celebratory description of middle-class quotidian life and
psychological experience.
Post-Revolutionary Gothic romance, by both men and women, followed "Monk" Lewis's sensationalism, exoticism, and eroticism rather
than Radcliffe's sensibility, picturesqueness, and feminized propriety and
rationalism. In view of increasing post-Revolutionary insistence on female propriety in life and literature, it may seem surprising that some
women novelists followed the former line. Charlotte Dacre, for example, went as far or farther than Lewis and her male contemporaries in
her four novels, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805). Zopoya;
or, The Moor (1806). The Libertine (1807). and The Passionr (1811 ) .
Dacre was married to the &tor of the reformist Morning Post newspaper, and published poetry (Hours of Solitude, 1805) that followed the
proto-Revolutionary "Della Cmscans" and appealed to reformist Romantic writers such as Byron and Shelley. Not surprisingly, Dacre's novels
represent extreme courtly decadence that could readily be interpreted
as figures for what was considered the dangerous decadence of Britain's
governing class in the face of the Napoleonic challenge. Though the treatment of this decadence is ambivalent, it reveals the continuing availability
of the Gothic romance to political readings.
Jane Austen's novels seem designed to exclude political readings,
but in the Revolutionary aftermath, as during the Revolution debate,
this could be another way of being political. The basis of her postRevolutionary intervention is a critique of sensibility as self-validating
R E V O L U T I O N I Z I N G THE NOVEL 385
subjective extravagance leading to social transgression-what many saw
as underwriting political and cultural expressions ranging from Revolutionary violence and Revolutionary feminism to post-Revolutionary
courtly decadence and Romanticism. Austen also counters Revolutionary and "English Jacobii" rationalism, determinism, and didacticism by
representing exercise of reason in everyday reality, by insisting on the
necessity for grace (or providential fortune) in order to win happinesseven with the exercise of hue reason-and by thoroughly formalizing her
message in characterization, plot, and narrative irony. Like many other
post-Revolutionary writers, she too advocates disciplined subjectivity and
professionalized domesticity as ways of resolving or avoiding Revolutionary rupture. It is true that underlying Austen's post-Revolutionary
vision is the Anglican theology of reason, works, and grace. But this theology was itself part of the political order and so had been challenged in
the Revolution debate by politicized and secularized forms of the religious doctrines of predestination held by certain sects of Nonconformists,
who in turn played a leading role both in "English Jacobinism" and in
emergent Romantic culture as a sublation of Revolutionary sympathy.
A purposefully different fictionalization of the Revolution debate in
terms of post-Revolutionary Romantic culture is seen in Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon (1816). Lamb was raised in upper-class Whig
circles where political reform and cautious approval of the early Revolution had been discussed. Lamb created an unusual novelistic expression
of these politics in Glenurvon (1816), which became a best-seller because it was thought to be a roman ir clef describing Lamb's affair with
Byron in 1812. In fact, Glenarvon is, like Frankenstein two years later, a
revival of the English Jacobin novel for a new political and literary context. It combines the work of Edgeworth, Opie, and the Gothic romancers
with Revolutionary history (the Irish rebellion of 1798) and transgressive Byronic Romanticism. L i e Revolutionary novels from Inchbald's
A Simple Story to Wotlstonecraft's The Wmngs of Woman; or, Maria,
it suggests autobiographical content, but harnessed to general political
themes. Like post-Revolutionary novels from Opie's Adeline Mowbray
and Dacre's Zojloya to de S a l ' s Corinne and Shelley's Frankenstein, it
exhibits a fascination with the transgression it ostensibly condemns. As a
result, and because of its ambitiousness in treating political and cultural
conflict in terms of &vided subjectivity in a transgressive heroine, it has
been read as merely a symptom of its author's own apparent lack of selfcontrol, which was in turn taken as an emblem of Regency decadence
and disorder.
386 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
*
In different ways, then, these women novelists subsume pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary feminizations of culture, literature, and politics
and the public sphere while refounding literature for the new conflicts of
the Revolutionary aftermath. But their achievement also faced increasing opposition from Romantic remasculinization of culture and literature.
This process had emerged in the mid-1790s. drawing from opposing
themes in the Revolution debate--on the one hand, widespread aversion to the "masculine" Jacobin Revolution, later reinforced by fear
of the militarist Napoleonic state, and, on the other hand, aversion to
pre-Revolutionary feminization of culture, reinforced by the claims of
Revolutionary feminism. By the 1810s the post-Revolutionary renewal
of women's writing to serve political and social reconciliation was being
increasingly marginalized or appropriated by men. This process is exemplified in the success of E.S. Barrett's satiric novel, The Heroine; or,
Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813), and more strikingly in Walter Scott's superseding of several lines of women's post-Revolutionary
fictitious historical narrative.
Rhonda Batchelor argues, in "The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth Century's Authentic Feminine Voice," that leading women novelists protested
and resisted, but finally conciliated this remasculinization of literature as
the only course open to them if they were to retain a public voice.
According to Batchelor, Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary feminist novel
The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria represents feminine subjectivity as
"overtly and radically political" (p. 348). and therefore inevitably embattled in a sexist (though admittedly unrevolutionized) society. But already
in Radcilffe's near-contemporary novel, The Italian, the revolutionary
community founded on authentic subjectivity is being reformulated as
subjectivity for itself. In Jane Porter's The Sconish Chiefs, subjectivity
and domesticity are made the motive forces for an anti-courtly militant
popular nationalism-apparently a post-Revolutionary reassertion of the
necessity for feminizing the public and political sphere. But, as Batchelor argues, woman is in fact limited to symbolic and inspirational public
meaning, and feminization seems to have political force only when embodied in a male. In Frankenstein, a reformulation of the politicized
Gothic mode practised by her parents, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Mary
Shelley gives an even more pessimistic account of the fate of the feminine, not only beyond but even within the domestic sphere.
Yet Shelley's novel also exhibits the ability of a woman intellectual
and writer to encompass the major literary forms, cultural movements,
REVOLUTlONlZlNG THE NOVEL 387
and political issues of her time. Frankenstein resumes central themes and
figures of proto-Revolutionary cultural critique, of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and of leading Romantic writers. It also attempts a comprehensive mythography of Revolutionary history, from the viewpoint
of the feminized Revolution of the French Girondins and "English Jacobins." As many critics have argued, Frankenstein is autobiographical
and protests against, among other things, the marginalization of women
in society and culture, even in avant-garde, revolutionary circles such as
that of Percy Shelley.12But it also generalizes that experience, true to the
example of the English Jacobin novelists, to validate oppositional politics in the public sphere. In her other novels, Shelley carries this project
into a range of historical societies and political regimes that were exemplary in Enlightenment and Revolutionary critique. The weight of
learning, range of experience, and literary craft necessary to represent
fictionally and persuasively the suppression of "the eighteenth-century's
authentic feminine voice" resist the argument they serve. Furthermore,
Mary Shelley's mythologizing of Revolutionary history and the Revolution debate had a powerful if contradictory effect in nineteenth and
twentieth-century culture and politics.
Women novelists continued to explore ways of eluding the remascul'iization of culture and the appropriation of their literary work while
modifying and assisting their class's advance to hegemony, in the light
of the Revolution. It is true that in some cases, such as the work of
Dacre, Lamb, and Shelley, these explorations often risked repelling or
bewildering their readers. In other cases, such as the work of Porter
and Morgan, conservative morality hardly palliated the effect of formal
experiment and innovation. But such work was basically not different
in motive from that of apparently more conventional and even apolitical novelists such as Edgeworth, Opie, and Austen. These writers, with
their predecessors, pursued individual but not isolated careers in novelizing the Revolution and, in the process, revolutionizing the novel to
a greater or lesser extent. For the particular conditions of the Revolution and its aftermath determined the work of these women novelists in
the sense of delimiting their political and artistic options but not dictating
their individual exercise of them. The formation of the Romantic literary canon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries obscured not only this
achievement but also the canons of political reading by which it might
I2 See studies ranging fmm Wen Mars. titcrory W o w (Garden Cily, NY: Anchor Boob,
1977), to Anne K.MeUor. Mary She&: Her Life, Her Fictioq Her Momfers ( O x f o ~Oxford
University Ress, 1989).
388 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
be understood. Recent criticism, especially from feminists, has recuperated some of this lost ground.13 This essay and those published with it
aim to continue this work and show how original and subtle the exercise
of those options often was.
University of Keele
13 See for example Bleanor 5.Unru'd Revolufiomlies: Five Women Novrlirtr of the 1790s
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1993); Niurla 1. Watson. Revolution ond the Form of
the English Novel 179&1825 (Oxford: anrendon Ress, 1994).