British women writers and the French Revolution

Adriana Craciun

"This new volume in the series Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print illuminates the significant extent to which British women writers cultivated a radicalized cosmopolitanism through their engagement with French revolutionary politics. British women were drawn to France for both its ancient regime associations as 'the paradise of lady wits' (to quote Fanny Burney), and its revolutionary politics that extended across gender and national lines. Most visible in the 1790s' writings of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Helen Maria Williams, yet persisting through the rise and fall of Napoleon in the works of Francophiles like Anne Plumptre and Lady Morgan, revolutionary cosmopolitanism flourished in women's writings of the Romantic era."--Jacket.