ABSTRACT

When, at the end of Sybil (1845), the eponymous heroine, the ‘daughter of the people’, marries her aristocratic lover, one of the ‘natural leaders of the people’, the marriage unites the Two Nations.1 This ending is symbolic in uniting the two most important strands of female political involvement between 1700 and 1850. In Sybil, we have the new and growing politicization and participation of women of the lower and middling classes in increasingly formalized, issue-based popular politics; in her mother-in-law, Lady Deloraine – ‘the only good woman the Tories have’2 – we have the long-established traditional involvement of élite women in politics for familial, social, and party-political ends. What is missing from Disraeli’s tableaux is anyone who represents the third strand of female political involvement, that nascent feminist political consciousness which would develop into the woman’s movement and, in time, draw in women from each of the other female political traditions.