ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the legacies of Romanticism's engagement with eighteenth-century revolutionary politics through the changing trope of woman as wanderer in Frances Burney's The Wanderer and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Both novels transform their already-migratory heroines at key narrative moments into actual vagrants: homeless, in flight from society, and seeking refuge in Nature. The chapter highlights the Romantic legacy of anti-Romanticism, or rather of the critique of Romantic idealism, which was as much part of the Victorians' inheritance as the ideals more commonly associated with the concept. Celeste Langan views vagrancy as "the framing issue of Romantic form and content". In The Wanderer, the anti-heroine Elinor Joddrel acclaims the disruptive implications of the French Revolution for gendered social norms. Elinor is clearly based on radical figures such as Wollstonecraft, both in her passionate rhetoric of sexual equality and in her suicidal impulses; she becomes the channel through which Burney can both articulate and expel the gendered aspects of the Revolution.
