Coelebs Deceived

The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.

“Jane Austen’s Families” focuses on family dynamics in Jane Austen’s six novels. After a general introduction, which places its approach in the context of ethical criticism, it divides into two sections. The first, “Family Dynamics,” consists of three chapters – “The Function of the Dysfunctional Family,” “Spoilt Children” and “Usefulness and Exertion.” The three chapters of section two, “Fathers and Daughters,” look at father–daughter relationships in “Mansfield Park,” “Emma” and “Persuasion.”

The result of extensive archival investigation, this meticulously researched book collects and describes for the first time the extant literary manuscripts and letters of the celebrated Bluestocking writer and Evangelical philanthropist Hannah More (1745-1833). Participating in the ongoing recovery of eighteenth-century women writers, Nicholas D. Smith's survey is an indispensable reference work not only for More scholars but for those researching the careers of many of her contemporaries. Features include an extended narrative analysis of the manuscripts that plots More's participation in the manuscript culture of the period and contextualizes the individual entries in the index; provenance details for the more substantial manuscript holdings in British and North American repositories; and identification of numerous autograph manuscripts and transcripts in public and private collections. More than 1,500 letters in 95 locations in Britain and North America have been inventoried and precise dates and internal locators are supplied when known. More's letters, the majority of which have never been published, are a largely untapped source of primary materials for scholars and students researching such diverse subjects as the literary activities and opinions of the Bluestocking circle, women's conduct and education, publishing and the book trade, the national debate over the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of the Evangelical movement, the conservative reaction to the American and French revolutions, and the Napoleonic wars.

This ground-breaking nineteenth-century volume is of considerable scholarly interest as an example of a femino-centric popular novel. Celia in Search of a Husband is a high-spirited and entertaining example of an anti-Jacobin novel, written at the height of the backlash against female intellectuals during the Napoleonic wars. Despite this hostile climate, the author sought to acknowledge the importance of female education and independence whilst at the same time endorsing the traditional Christian teaching that a wife should be subordinate to her husband. Although second wave feminists prioritized the progressive writers with whom they more readily identified, more recent scholarship has rightly paid close attention to conservative or moralist writers such as Miss Byron and recognized how influential they were. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this edition of Celia in Search of a Husband contributes to this scholarship on the literary history of women’s writing, and will be a welcome to those with a particularly interest in women’s writing, satiric novels and spoofs, and Jane Austen.