ABSTRACT
Orientalism breathed the Romantic spirit: challenging the classicism and classifications of literary orthodoxy lay down by masculine education. Its sensuality repudiated the capitalist work ethic pervading the male-dominated public sphere and enshrined in puritan fictional autobiography. Enumerating mind-boggling luxuries was as much about the modern capitalism emerging in industrial Britain and America as the European ancient regime. The Romantic consumer ethic that emerged beginning in the nineteenth century was no anomaly but a tool Americans needed in order to internalize both a productive “Protestant work ethic” and a romantic expressive, hedonistic consumerism. Lady Caroline Lamb’s motive in publishing her first Gothic romance Glenarvon is generally understood to be personal revenge, after the poet brutally terminated their adulterous affair in 1812. Many critics and biographers have been alert to Lord Byron’s responsiveness to Lamb and his perceived feminization at the hands of female readers, but it is time to pay attention to Lady Caroline’s fiction after Glenarvon in its own terms.
