ABSTRACT
Feminine Romanticism differs markedly from masculine Romanticism in its attitude to the political process. In opposition to the revolutionary Promethean politics urged by the young Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Blake, Godwin and Percy Shelley, a program that advocated radical social change and Utopian transformations of the social and political order, the women writers of the Romantic era offered an alternative program grounded on the trope of the family-politic, on the idea of a nation-state that evolves gradually and rationally under the mutual care and guidance of both mother and father. Frequently invoking Edmund Burke, they endorsed his concept of the organic development both of the mind and of the political body under benevolent parental control as the model for a successful human community, although, as we shall see, at the same time they challenged Burkes patriarchal sexual politics.
