A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Sense and Sensibility is the first novel by the English author Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the title page where the author's name might have been. It tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne as they come of age. They have an older half-brother, John, and a younger sister, Margaret.
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today is most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel, in which she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.
The Absentee is a novel by Maria Edgeworth, published in 1812 in Tales of Fashionable Life, that expresses the systemic evils of the absentee landlord class of Anglo-Irish and the desperate condition of the Irish peasantry. There are many turns of plot and much information about Ireland as well as Irish dialect and details of shallow London fashionable life, and the egregious results of the propertied classes treating their Irish lands as a resource to be exploited rather than as a relationship among classes and with the land. In this respect, it addresses similar themes to her first novel, Castle Rackrent.
Charlotte Smith was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that.
Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is a novel written by English author Frances Burney and first published in 1778. Although published anonymously, its authorship was revealed by the poet George Huddesford in what Burney called a "vile poem".
Sydney, Lady Morgan, was an Irish novelist, best known for The Wild Irish Girl (1806), a romantic, and some critics suggest, "proto-feminist", novel with political and patriotic overtones. Her work, including continental travelogues, sparked controversy and faced censorship. She counted Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron among her defenders.
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy.
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th- and 19th-century literary genre which presents and celebrates the concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a woman's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in 1788 shortly after her summary dismissal and her decision to embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women in 18th-century Britain.
General Sir Charles Asgill, 2nd Baronet, was a career soldier in the British Army. At the end of the American Revolutionary War he became the principal of the so-called Asgill Affair of 1782, in which his retaliatory death sentence while a prisoner of war was commuted by the American forces who held him, due to the direct intervention of the government of France. Later in his career, he was involved in the Flanders campaign, the suppression of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and was Commander of the Eastern Division of Ireland during the Irish rebellion of 1803.
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
Belinda is an 1801 novel by the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth. It was first published in three volumes by Joseph Johnson of London. The novel was Edgeworth's second published, and was considered controversial in its day for its depiction of an interracial marriage. It was reprinted by Pandora Press in 1986.
John Willoughby is a fictional character in Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility. He is described as being a handsome young man with a small estate, but has expectations of inheriting his aunt's large estate. He is in love with Marianne Dashwood, who is also a character in the novel.
Patronage is a four volume fictional work by Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth and published in 1814. It is one of her later books, after such successes as Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806) and The Absentee in 1812, to name a few. The novel is a long and ambitious one which she began writing in 1809. It is the longest of her novels.
A Simple Story is a novel by English author and actress, Elizabeth Inchbald. Published in early 1791 as an early example of a "novel of passion", it was very successful and became widely read in England and abroad. It went into a second edition in March 1791. It is still in print today.
Honora Edgeworth was an eighteenth-century English writer, mainly known for her associations with literary figures of the day particularly Anna Seward and the Lunar Society, and for her work on children's education. Sneyd was born in Bath in 1751, and following the death of her mother in 1756 was raised by Canon Thomas Seward and his wife Elizabeth in Lichfield, Staffordshire until she returned to her father's house in 1771. There, she formed a close friendship with their daughter, Anna Seward. Having had a romantic engagement to John André and having declined the hand of Thomas Day, she married Richard Edgeworth as his second wife in 1773, living on the family estate in Ireland till 1776. There she helped raise his children from his first marriage, including Maria Edgeworth, and two children of her own. Returning to England she fell ill with tuberculosis, which was incurable, dying at Weston in Staffordshire in 1780. She is the subject of a number of Anna Seward's poems, and with her husband developed concepts of childhood education, resulting in a series of books, such as Practical Education, based on her observations of the Edgeworth children. She is known for her stand on women's rights through her vigorous rejection of the proposal by Day, in which she outlined her views on equality in marriage.
The Asgill Affair or Huddy-Asgill Affair was a diplomatic incident during the American Revolution named after a British army officer, Captain Charles Asgill.
Ennui is a novel by Maria Edgeworth published in 1809. It is a fictitious memoir of the Earl of Glenthorn, an English man who experiences excessive boredom (ennui) and attempts to find novelty and meaning in life. Edgeworth began writing the novel before 1805, and though she said she finished it that year, she likely continued revising it until around 1808.
