Robert Bage's Hermsprong, Or, Man as He is Not

Book excerpt: The first edited and fully annotated edition of Robert Bage's Hermsprong or Man As He Is Not (1796), this book will make accessible in accurate form an English novel that is lively in the reading and important in its historical interest. Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Thomas Love Peacock, among others, were attracted to it. As Professor Tave's introduction shows, Hermsprong has political and social interest because it is in part a witty response to the English attitude toward the French Revolution and to the rights of man and woman. The novel was reviewed enthusiastically by Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was considered dangerous politically and morally by some of its nineteenth-century critics. This edition has a critical and historical introduction, bibliography, chronology of the author's life, a note on the text, the text itself with full annotations and textual notes. Both the text and the commentary will be valuable to those who have an interest in the English novel or in the literature and the history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.