Table of Contents

1. Aristocratic Romanticism: Women travellers, Byron and the Gendering of Italy 2.‘Thunder Without Rain’: Mary Shelley, Byronic Prometheanism and Romantic Idealism 3. Cutting The Corsair down to size: Lady Caroline Lamb’s Ada Reis and George Sand’s L’Uscoque 4. ‘The interest is very strong, especially for Mr Darcy’: Jane Austen, Byron and romantic love 5. "My voice shall with thy future visions blend": Byron’s daughters, Lady Byron and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 6. "Happiness is not a potato": Byron, Belgium and the romantic feminism of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette 7. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Romantic racism and her pathology of Byronic Masculinity

About the Author

Caroline Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Reviews

"Literary celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain was a male game, and… famous woman writers played this game in order to change it. The risk of this strategy is one made especially evident in Franklin’s book. [This book] provide[s] nuanced accounts of how women writers resisted masculine models of influence, but also demonstrate[s] the danger of being seduced by the very paradigm, or paragon, you set out to reform." - Times Literary Supplement"Franklin displays two outstanding strengths. First, she reads intertextuality through politics, showing that women's novels used Byron to stage major debates about government, the status of the political subject, and the rights of the individual in society. Second, she reads the individual texts of an author in terms of her whole career, so that we see not snapshots but a trajectory. Since most of the writers she treats were less prolific than their Victorian successors, she can effectively analyze the novels of each within a single chapter." - Andrew Elfenbein, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota'...Franklin's The Female Romantics provides such an effective outline of women writers' responses to Byronism that scholars interested in Byron's reception history will find much of note here.' - European Romantic Review