This book is a major reassessment of the French Revolutions impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. Focusing particularly - but by no means exclusively - on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers. A team of international scholars study how English Romantic novelists sought to guide the British response to an event that seemed likely to turn the world upside down.

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Contents: A. D. Cousins/Dani Napton/Stephanie Russo: Introduction. The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period – M. O. Grenby: ‘Very Naughty Doctrines’: Children, Children’s Literature, Politics and the French Revolution Crisis – Stephanie Russo: ‘A People Driven By Terror’: Charlotte Smith, and the Politics of Counter-Revolution – Gary Kelly: ‘The Sentiments I Have Embodied’: Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Adaptation of the Revolutionary Novel – Stephanie Russo/A. D. Cousins: ‘In a State of Terrour and Misery Indescribable’: Violence, Madness and Revolution in the novels of Frances Burney – Stephanie Russo/A. D. Cousins: ‘Educated in Masculine Habits’: Mary Robinson, Androgyny, and the Ideal Woman – Dani Napton: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Agency in Scott’s and – Chris Danta: Revolution at a Distance: Jane Austen and Personalised History – Michael Ackland: Towards Rehabilitating ‘The Long Blighted Tree of Knowledge’: Mary Shelley’s Revolutionary Concept of Self-Governance and Dominion in – Deirdre Coleman: ‘Adapted to Her Meridian’: The Novel, The Woman Reader, and the French Revolution.