ABSTRACT
The major Romantic periodicals, the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, hailed the novel of manners, a genre they identified with the major female novelists of their time, as a new realism of the ordinary. These novels, often richly heteroglossic like the periodicals that sought to tame them, also offered a critique of the ordinary and an insistence on the political and historical ramifications of the lives of women, particularly the (de)valuing of women’s labor. The quarterly press, however, repressed such critiques by positioning both the narrative and characterization to naturalize the genre, its mode of “observation,” and its telos of marriage. As is evident in reviews of Burney’s The Wanderer and Edgeworth’s Patronage, an attempt to professionalize patriarchy in the midst of a reconfiguration of the marriage economy is intrinsic to the aesthetic judgments of both corporate identities such as the Edinburgh reviewer and individualized career periodical writers like William Hazlitt.
