ABSTRACT
Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth have all been positioned as Anti-Jacobin writers, although recent criticism has challenged this placement, particularly in Opie and Edgeworth's case. Each writer's political position remains open to interpretation, both in relation to the particular text under discussion and over the course of their career from progressive to moderate. Opie's Adeline Mowbray, Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers and Edgeworth's Belinda each represent an attempt to respond to Maria, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft's theory and practice, life and writing. These responses needed to negotiate the reactionary response to Wollstonecraft which troped her life as prostituted and writings as politically dangerous, at the same time as each author strove to utilise Wollstonecraft's thought to inform their own feminist aims. Opie, Hamilton and Edgeworth's novels, therefore, seem suspicious of putting theory into practice, and hinge on the difficulties inherent in interpretation.
