Linda Lang-Peralta, ed., Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999. Pp. 192. $21.95.

In 1796, Thomas Matthias complained, in his satire The Pursuits of Literature, that gothic fictions "had propagated their species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn is in every novel shop." The gothic novels of the 1790s may have filled the bookshops, but they, and other novels of diverse interest, did not long detain critics, even when they attracted the opprobrium of moralists. As Anna Seward remarked in her essay periodical Variety (No. 26, 1787) "To read novels frequently, and indiscriminately, is a most pernicious habit." Indeed, the novels of the 1790s, with a few notable exceptions, received little critical notice until the last few decades of the twentieth century. Their eventual rescue, if that is the word, was accomplished by readers motivated by varieties of historicist and feminist critical...

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