ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on artistic glosses. The use of these glosses by Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson indicates the ways in which marginal groups—those without official representation—sought to draw attention to, and have an effect upon, political and social realities of their times. The book expresses that the period of 1789–1830 witnessed a series of challenges by the novelists Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson to assumptions about how authority and class were socially and politically determined. The original skepticism of readers toward truth claims in the print media, which increased with the burgeoning critical journals, informs Lady Morgan's own attitudes toward literature and allows her to question the "virtue" of the Edinburgh literati, to parody John Wilson Croker in her novel O'Donnel and to employ her paratexts to debate the merits of the reviewers.
