ABSTRACT
A fellowship in political opinions was the only bond which united Amelia Opie to many with whom she associated. Her own good sense and firm rectitude of principle, happily preserved her from the follies and errors into which not a few around her were led, by their extravagant zeal for a liberty which speedily degenerated into license. Amelia Opie was enthusiastic, ardent, perhaps imprudent, at least so she seems to have judged in cooler moments; but there was too much of the pure womanly character in her, to suffer her ever to sympathize with the assertors of “woman’s rights”. She was not to be spoiled even though exposed to the influence of Horace Walpole’s “philosophising serpents, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Woollstonecrofts”.
