Abstract
In The Rise of the Novel (Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Hogarth, London, [1957] 1987), Ian Watt contends that although more eighteenth-century novels were written by women than by men, women’s dominance was only numerical rather than qualitative. In relation to the Romantic-period novel, both aspects of his statement have been interrogated. The digital approach to the humanities has led to a more complex picture in relation to quantity, while the importance of the female-authored Romantic novel both to Romanticism and within the history of the novel has been reassessed. Writing across a range of genres, the women novelists of this period sometimes preempted and often shaped and critiqued the aesthetic categories identified with Romanticism. As a result of their contribution, the novel in the Romantic period is an innovative, experimental, and diverse form.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Arville Castle. An Historical Romance. 1795. 2 vols. London: Crosby.
Austen, Jane. (1811) 1933. Sense and Sensibility. Vol. 1 of The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. (1818a) 1933. Northanger Abbey. In Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. (1818b) 1933. Persuasion. In Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burke, Edmund. (1759) 1987. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 2nd ed. Edited by James T. Boulton. Oxford: Blackwell.
——— (1790) 1968. Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. Edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Burney, Frances. (1778) 1982. Evelina or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Edited by Edward A. Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. (1814) 1991a. The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties. Edited by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Marilyn. (1975) 1987. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dacre, Charlotte. (1806) 1997. Zofloya, or the Moor. Edited by Kim Ian Michasiw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Edgeworth, Maria. (1800) 1992. Castle Rackrent. In Castle Rackrent and Ennui, edited by Marilyn Butler, 59–138. London: Penguin.
———. (1801) 2003. Belinda. Edited by Siobhán Kilfeather. Vol. 2 of The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, edited by Marilyn Butler. 12 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto.
———. (1809a) 1992. Ennui. In Castle Rackrent and Ennui, edited by Marilyn Butler. 139–323. London: Penguin.
———. 1809b. Tales of Fashionable Life. 3 vols. London: Johnson.
———. 1812a. The Absentee in Tales of Fashionable Life. Vols. 5–6. London: Johnson.
———. 1812b. Tales of Fashionable Life. 6 vols. London: Johnson.
———. 1817. Ormond. In Harrington, a Tale and Ormond, a Tale. 3 vols. Vols 2 and 3. London: Hunter.
———. 1834. Helen, a Tale. 3 vols. London: Bentley.
Fenwick, Eliza. (1795) 1998. Secresy, or the Ruin on the Rock. Edited by Isobel Grundy. Peterborough: Broadview.
Garside, Peter. 2000. “The English Novel in the Romantic Era.” In The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, edited by Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwlering. 2 vols. 2: 15–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gore, Catherine. 1829. Romances of Real Life. 3 vols. London: Colburn.
———. 1831. Pin Money: A Novel. 3 vols. London: Bentley.
Green, Sarah. 1809. Tales of the Manor. 2 vols. London: Crosby.
———. 1810. Romance Readers and Romance Writers: A Satirical Novel. 3 vols. London: Hookham and Hookham.
Hamilton, Elizabeth. (1800) 2000. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Edited by Claire Grogan. Peterborough: Broadview.
———. 1808. The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer’s Ingle-Nook. Edinburgh: Ballantyne for Manners and Miller, and Cheyne; London: Cadell and Davies, and Miller.
Hays, Mary. (1796) 1996. Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Edited by Eleanor Ty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Labbe, Jacqueline. 1998. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism. London: Macmillan.
———. 2000. The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lady Jane Grey: An Historical Tale. 1791. 2 vols. London: Minerva.
Lee, Sophia. (1783–1785) 2000. The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times. Edited by April Alliston. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Mellor, Anne K. 1993. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge.
———. 1995. “A Criticism of their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics.” In Questioning Romanticism, edited by John Beer, 29–48. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mitford, Mary Russell. 1824. Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery. Vol. 1. London: Whittaker.
Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Anchor Doubleday.
Opie, Amelia. 1805. Adeline Mowbray: Or the Mother and Daughter, a Tale. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan. (1806) 1999. The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale. Edited by Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poovey, Mary. 1984. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Price, Fiona. 2009. Revolutions in Taste 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism. Farnham: Ashgate.
Raven, James. 2000. “Historical Introduction.” In The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, edited by Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwlering. 2 vols. 1: 1–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reeve, Clara. (1778) 1977. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. Edited by James Trainer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1791. The School for Widows. A Novel. 3 vols. London: Hookham, Harrison, and Miller.
Ross, Marlon B. 1989. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1761;1803) 1989. Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters. Translated by William Kendrick. 2 vols. Oxford: Woodstock.
———. (1762) 1991b. Emile: Or on Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. London: Penguin.
Schofield, Mary Anne, and Cecilia Macheski, eds. 1986. Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. (1818) 1994. Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Edited by Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Charlotte. 1789. Ethelinde or the Recluse of the Lake. 5 vols. London: Cadell.
———. (1792) 2001. Desmond. Edited by Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
———. (1794) 2005. The Old Manor House. Edited by Jacqueline M. Labbe. Peterborough: Broadview.
Thompson, Judith. 1998. “A Voice in the Representation”: John Thelwall and the Enfranchisement of Literature. In Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, edited by Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, 122–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walpole, Horace. (1764) 1982. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Edited by W. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watt, Ian. (1957) 1987. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Hogarth.
West, Jane. (1796) 1797. A Gossip’s Story, and a Legendary Tale. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Longman.
———. 1799. A Tale of the Times. 2nd ed. London: Longman.
———. 1827. Ringrove; Or, Old Fashioned Notions. 2 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
Wilson, Carol Shiner, and Joel Haefner, eds. 1994. Re-visioning Romanticism, British Women Writers 1776–1837. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1788) 1989. Mary, A Fiction. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. 7 vols. 1:1–73. London: Pickering.
———. (1790) 1989. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. 7 vols. 5:1–78. London: Pickering.
———. (1792) 1989. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In Butler and Todd 1989, 5:79–266.
Further Reading
Labbe, Jacqueline, ed. 2010. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Looser, Devoney, ed. 2015. The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Price, Fiona. 2009. Revolutions in Taste 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism. Farnham: Ashgate.
Raven, James. 2000. “Historical Introduction.” In The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, edited by Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwlering. 2 vols. 1: 1–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Price, F. (2024). Novels. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_20-3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_20-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11945-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11945-4
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities