ABSTRACT
The critique of Amelia Opie’s Poems (1802) in the inaugural issue of the Edinburgh Review (Oct. 1802) offers a model of the periodical’s practices of reading women’s poetry and enacts its strategies of creating not only the Edinburgh reader and reviewer, but also the Edinburgh author. The periodical’s critique of genre in the Opie article genders not only the writer under review—demarcating the bounds of appropriate form, style, and sentiment—but also genders by implicit comparison both the reader of the periodical and the Edinburgh reviewer: masculine, Whig, and committed to the maintenance of corporate identity.
