Introduction

The period from 1790 to 1820 was marked by intense social and political upheaval in Britain and continental Europe. Despite increasing opportunities and expanding suffrage open to men, particularly those of the upper ranks, by the close of the century Englishwomen could not vote, and they were barred from most professions and from voicing their opinions in nearly all public arenas. Women did, however, have one available means to engage in political debate in the public sphere: writing. For women, the most attractive and acceptable of the literary genres was the novel, despite ongoing debate about the genre’s potential corrupting inuence. While women had been active participants in the literary marketplace since the Restoration, female novelists outperformed their male counterparts in the decades between 1790 and 1820 and predominantly published novels in the didactic genre, a genre that mandates ‘instruction as a primary element or tendency’.1 The aim of this collection is to discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected during the revolutionary period. The collection can be divided into two parts, which are inuenced, respectively, by Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More. The early essays encapsulate the mix of radicalism and conservatism in the 1790s, though they share a Wollstonecraftian emphasis on institutional reform. The latter group of essays exhibit a largely conservative turn that epitomizes post-revolutionary British culture in the wake of More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808); they link the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity.