ABSTRACT
Up to this point, I have been tracking the manifestations of Wollstonecraft's “revolution in female manners” the ways in which writing by women in the Romantic period constructed a new version of the ideal woman, one who was rational rather than emotional or sexual, one who participated in an egalitarian marriage that became the model for good government, one who cooperated ecologically with a Nature troped as a loving sister. Wollstonecraft's construction of femininity explicitly challenged the dominant gender ideology of her culture, the concept of the female promoted by conservative and radical thinkers alike, from Burke to Rousseau. In this chapter I want to pursue the question: what happens when a Romantic woman writer chooses to inhabit rather than reject the hegemonic construction of the ideal woman?
