Women & Romanticism Vol4

Book excerpt: First published in 2006. Women and Romanticism’s fourth volume covers The Only Child; or Portia Bellenden. Amelia Alderson Opie, the author of Portia Bellenden; or, the Only Child, the novel that comprises the fourth volume of this collection, was born in 1769, making her ten years younger than Mary Wollstonecraft and twenty-eight years older than Mary Shelley; however, Opie outlived both mother and daughter. She died in 1853 at the age of 84, two years after her final trip to London and a visit to one of Victorian London’s grandest achievements, the Great Exhibition. Until the 1980s, a five-volume collection of materials on ‘Women and Romanticism’ would have been inconceivable, since Romantic studies largely restricted itself to a consideration of the major male poets of the period (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats), When women were present in accounts of Romanticism, they were considered in terms of their literary function (as objects of representation), or in relation to their domestic (as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers of the authors). Indeed, the first Romantic women writers to enter academic discourse were those with familial connections to the canonized poets: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth. Other writers of interest in the 1970s included Frances Burney and Jane Austen.