Lisa Wood, York University
Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2003), 81-98
This essay examines antirevolutionary women writers of the post-French Revolutionary period who were dedicated to combating what the novelist and moralist Jane West called “the alarming relaxation of principle that too surely discriminates a declining age.” This essay tracks the conservative politics of women intellectuals who were more likely to applaud Edmund Burke than to endorse Mary Wollstonecraft and who took part in a broad, heterogeneous, and active conservative print culture. Focusing on the Evangelical Hannah More’s only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), and Jane West’s female narrator, Mrs. Prudentia Homespun, in her five novels between 1793 and 1810 (but particularly A Gossip’s Story), the essay shows how these writers manage, in a conservative climate and with conservative aims, to nonetheless achieve limited forms of authority in narration: More, by maneuvering class and gender in her use of a gentleman as a narrator, and West, by employing a female narrator who displays the conflict between conservative ideology and the possibility for an authoritative female voice.
