Wollstonecraft's Ghost by Andrew McInnes

Author:Andrew McInnes [McInnes, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315523156
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Barbauld’s confrontation between tyranny and liberty, envisaged on a continental scale, echoes in Burney’s attempt to connect an individual woman’s desire to live independently with the terrifying exigencies of the French Revolution and in Austen’s smaller scale focus on an individual woman’s hushed obedience to a power experienced as colossal. Barbauld’s poem was harshly reviewed for its lack of patriotism, amounting to disloyalty in time of war. John Wilson Croker, in his review of the poem for the Quarterly, explicitly attacked Barbauld as a woman writer straying into the ‘male’ genre of historical poetry.5 Women writing about the historical moment were seen as overstepping a political boundary, breaching the faultline between literary and political public spheres analysed by Habermas.

Both Burney and Austen engage with their historical moment, however; with Burney exploring the consequences of the French Revolution on the private life of her heroine and Austen setting the action of her novel, albeit ambiguously, around the abolition of the slave trade.6 The abolition movement, although hailed as a moral success, had economic implications for English estates dependent on the free flow of slave labour, explored in Austen’s treatment of the moral and economic failings of the Bertram family.7 The financial aftershocks of war also threatened social stability, with the late 1800s and early 1810s seeing the rise of radical protest amongst the working classes. Working class radicalism triggered military violence, culminating in the Peterloo massacre of 1819. This event is protested against in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘England in 1819’, sharply criticising the royal dissolution, political stagnation and police violence of ‘our tempestuous day’.8 Although Austen and Burney are both more conservative than either the explicitly radical Shelley or the challenging, Dissenting Barbauld, their novels share elements of the poets’ trenchant social criticism, revealing the striking continuities between writers of different political persuasions in their negotiation of the post-revolutionary landscape of early nineteenth-century politics, social reform and generic limitations.

Peter Knox-Shaw’s connection between Austen’s earlier novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) and William Godwin’s 1799 novel St. Leon as Post-Jacobin texts (see Chapter 21) draws out the two authors’ shared concerns over the development of the individual in relation to society and for social stability in the post-revolutionary era. Knox-Shaw argues that Austen is influenced more by the sceptical tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment than the Anti-Jacobin writing with which Marilyn Butler influentially aligns her. He uses the term Post-Jacobin to align Austen’s seemingly conservative concerns with Godwin’s, read as dangerously radical at the time, in order to ‘point to the moderate, even liberal character of Jane Austen’s stance among her contemporaries’.9 In my view, post-revolutionary writing, from formerly radical writers such as Godwin and Hays to explicitly conservative ones such as Hamilton, through more liberal thinkers like Edgeworth, share a slippery perspective on the desire for reform balanced by the need for stability, exemplified in Austen and Burney’s works, under discussion in this chapter. I suggest that the lack of critical consensus over the political allegiances expressed in Burney’s The Wanderer

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