Unbounded attachment : sentiment and politics in the age of the French Revolution / Harriet Guest.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guest, Harriet, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Women and literature.

Great Britain.

History.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--Women authors.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Politics and literature.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Emotions in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 212 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Unbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society. This potential is important to the complex politics of Charlotte Smith's response, in her long poem The Emigrants, to the onset of war with France in 1793. The language of sentiment eases the transitions m Mary Robinson's writing between courtly praise for the French queen and liberal political opinion, and shapes her attitudes to the exchange between personal sociability and the expanding commercial market for her work. For women writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Elizabeth Inchbald, the display of sentiment makes it possible to negotiate between the demands of commercial success and sociable or political allegiance. William Godwin admired Mary Wollstonecraft's capacity for an all-embracing sentiment of 'unbounded attachment' to humanity, and posthumous accounts such as Mary Hays's, as well as fictional heroines loosely based on Wollstonecraft's reputation, emphasized the strength of feeling, the enthusiasm, which united her private character and her politics, and evoked powerful responses from both her immediate social circle and her readers. The success of Jane Austen's novels depended on the access they gave readers to the privacy of her heroines' minds, where their sensibility apprehends an underlying coherence in the apparently disjointed social worlds in which they lived. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the War with France in 1793 16

2 Mary Robinson in the Metropolis 45

3 Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft 88

4 Amelia Alderson and Mrs Opie: 'more of the woman' 123

5 'Inadvertencies and misconstructions': Jane Austen's Heroines 162

6 Conclusion 188.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [193]-206) and index.

ISBN:

9780199686810

0199686815

OCLC:

858005055