Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers readers a real rarity: the first printing of Mary Tighe's unpublished manuscript novel Selena, a brilliant, compulsively readable, beautifully written, and psychologically astute courtship novel that explores and critiques society, manners, morality, class, fashion, gender roles, sexual identity, familial relationships, inheritance laws, economics, education, the marriage market, religious bias, animal cruelty, female dependence, and more in late eighteenth-century England, Ireland, and Scotland. While Edwin's Petrarchan and semi-Wordsworthian sensibility views poetry as a means of expressing and thereby relieving the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, Lady Emily broadens Edwin's masculinist perspective by telling Selena that the act of poetic composition can actually induce or intensify strong emotion. It is one of the great unknown treasures of the British Romantic era, a work that not only invokes Burney's Cecilia, Smith's Emmeline, Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Edgeworth's Belinda.