ABSTRACT

Published nearly twenty years after Mary Wollstonecraft's death, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Frances Burney's The Wanderer engage with the textual legacy of Wollstonecraft's revolutionary life and work in the 1790s and with the post-revolutionary context of the 1810s in which they were written. Nevertheless, both novels reveal the way in which Wollstonecraft's radical analysis of the impact of deficient education on women's character and opportunities permeated early nineteenth-century women's writing, as Austen and Burney draw on her ideas and develop them for the post-revolutionary context of England in 1814. In 1814, England was still a year away from winning the war with Napoleonic France; this long war, spanning from the late 1790s until Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, had far-reaching consequences on life in Britain. The publication of Walter Scott's Waverley also obviously makes 1814 a richly literary year, connecting historical concerns with the contemporary situation of Scotland in the novel's subtitle 'Tis Sixty Years Since.