Introduction

Discipline, the second novel by the Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778–1818), was published in 1814. While less well known than its predecessor Self-Control (1811), it is nonetheless equally deserving of a central place in the canon of Romantic-era fiction. A wide-ranging novel, it shares many themes with contemporary fiction. For example, in both her novels Brunton shows a concern for women’s particular difficulties in earning money, a concern she shares with Frances Burney’s later novels. As in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Maria: or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798), scenes in Discipline paint the horror of being falsely imprisoned in an insane asylum. Like Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) or Sydney Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl (1806), the novel attempts an accurate portrayal of what was then a little-known and remote region of Britain. It is Discipline’s innovative attempt at psychological realism, however, that sets it apart from its contemporaries. In this sense Brunton’s work is striking in a number of ways. One of the most accomplished instances of what Lisa Wood has termed the ‘Evangelical romance’, Discipline offers strong themes both of women’s religious convictions and of their passionate emotional lives. ¹ Through the moral growth of its heroine Ellen Percy, Discipline insists on women’s self-determination, and their ability to become rational agents in a world that treats them as objects merely of desire or contempt.