ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains a popular and influential women writer, Elizabeth Hamilton, who increasingly features in current studies but who invariably invokes the use of the Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin terms in confusing. Hamilton, who has reasserted her presence following the availability of several of her works in modern editions, continues to prove a difficult writer to categorize comfortably within the existing political paradigm. More recently Matthew Grenby, who reminds us of the polarity in The Anti-Jacobin Novel, concludes that several authors are much more problematic than has often been thought and do defy easy political stereotyping. The time is now right to discuss these complicated or problematic writers, amongst whom Hamilton numbers, from a new perspective. The book suggests a reassessment of Elizabeth Hamilton by genre rather than by partisan politics rescues her from Johnson's category of ideologically ambivalent or challenged.
