Anne Mellor's

Romanticism & Gender

Current descriptions of British literary Romanticism are almost entirely grounded on the writing of six male poets. Yet, between the years 1780 and 1830, women writers produced at least half of the literature published in England. Taking as representative the twenty most influential, gifted, or widely read women writers of the romantic period, Romanticism and Gender attempts to define an alternative literary tradition.

Rather than celebrating the imagination, or the overflow of powerful feeling, female romantic writers tended to extol the workings of the rational mind--a mind relocated in the female as well as the male body. Insisting upon the fundamental equality of women and men, these women endorsed a construction of subjectivity based on difference, an ethic of care, and a concept of community.

Focusing on the writings of Wollstonecraft, Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Radcliffe, Morgan, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hemans, Landon, Mary Shelley, and Williams, Romanticism and Gender analyzes the ideological investments and the generic choices of a neglected period in the British female literary tradition. Mellor also reveals that ideological cross-dressing occurred in romantic writing, using the work of John Keats and Emily Brontė as major examples.

Romanticism and Gender is the first attempt to give a broad overview of British romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

Anne K. Mellor is Professor of English and Women's Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Math Shelly: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, published by Routledge.