Introduction

William Godwin, “Essay against re-opening the war with France” (1793), quoted in Mark Philp, “Thompson, Godwin and the French Revolution”, History Workshop Journal 39 (1995), p. 95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 51.Google Scholar

Habermas, p. 56. For examples of feminist responses to Habermas see Nancy Frazer, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42Google Scholar

Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration”, in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 91–116.Google Scholar

Anne Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 3.Google Scholar

Thompson briefly acknowledges the political importance of both Wollstonecraft and More. He mentions “the intellectual tradition of Godwin and Mary Woll-stonecraft”, p. 179, as well as her writings on behalf of women’s rights (p. 94) but does not expand his discussion of her work beyond a few passing comments. Regarding More, he writes, “The sensibility of the Victorian middle class was nurtured in the 1790s by frightened gentry who had seen miners, potters and cutlers reading [Paine’s] Rights of Man, and its foster-parents were William Wilberforce and Hannah More”, p. 57. Nonetheless, in spite of the prominence he assigns her, More and her writings are mentioned later only briefly, anecdotally, in passing. (Wilberforce is discussed more.) Goodwin’s references to Wollstonecraft and More are even briefer. He mentions Wollstonecraft only through her relationship to Godwin, and although he notes the importance of More’s Cheap Repository Tracts — they “outsold even Paine and long outlasted the Loyalist associations which had sponsored them” (p. 265) — that remark is the sole acknowledgement of her, or her work, in his book. Goodwin relates, in passing, to Anna Barbauld and Amelia Opie as members of the Norwich Dissenting circles, but does not discuss their writings. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966)Google Scholar

Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

Philp, “Thompson, Godwin and the French Revolution”, p. 90. See also Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

It is significant that other historians, in their work to recover women’s past political presence, note the need to examine a variety of discursive genres but at the same time continue to overlook, or marginalize the radical group of women writers in the 1790s. For example, Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, in the introduction to their collection of essays, Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Smith’s lifelong financial struggle is a major theme in her work, appearing in her literary texts themselves and in the prefaces that accompany them. Smith’s struggle to raise her large family and to receive her rightful share of her father-in-law’s inheritance has been well-documented. See Judith Phillips Stanton “Charlotte Smith’s ‘Literary Business’: Income, Patronage and Indigence”, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 1(1987) 375–400Google Scholar

Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, A Critical Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).Google Scholar

Smith’s letters relate her financial situation in meticulous detail, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

Robinson herself in The Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written By Herself (London: R. Phillips, 1801).Google Scholar

Judith Pascoe, Introduction, Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Pascoe (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), pp. 33–4Google Scholar

Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers and Money, 1790–1820”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987), pp. 196–7.Google Scholar

James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald: Including her Familiar Correspondence with the most distinguished persons of her time (London: Richard Bentley, 1833)Google Scholar

Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).Google Scholar

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 178.Google Scholar

Influential works on this subject are Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar

Claudia Johnson’s response to Butler, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar

Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 2.Google Scholar

For a comprehensive survey of anti-Jacobin literary works, including many by women, see M.O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See, for example, West’s A Tale of the Times (London: Longman and Rees, 1799)Google Scholar

Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).Google Scholar

Thomas J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satiric Poem in Dialogue with Notes (1794) 4th edition (London: T. Becket, 1797), p. 14.Google Scholar

Heath is identified as the author of this review by Emily de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 185.Google Scholar

In representing the centrality of Burke I am also aware of the need to recognize the more nuanced nature of the debate as a whole. See, for example, Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar

Iain Hampsher-Monk, ed., The Impact of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 57.Google Scholar

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J.C.D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001), p. 183.Google Scholar

John Barrell and Jon Mee, “Introduction”, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 8 vols. eds. Barrell and Mee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–2007), i., p. xiii.Google Scholar

John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

William Godwin, Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 171–2.Google Scholar

Raymond Williams, Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and society (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 15.Google Scholar

Inchbald to Godwin, 10 September 1797, in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876), p. 277.Google Scholar

In The Poems of Charlotte Smith, Stuart Curran has included seventy-nine shorter poems, in addition to the Sonnets, The Emigrants and Beachy Head. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

For an excellent recent survey of women’s writing during the revolutionary decade, see William Stafford, English Feminists and their Opponents in the 1790s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792) eds. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), p. 6.Google Scholar