Table of Contents

"At once above - beneath her sex" - the heroine in male-authored Regency verse romance; "a soulless toy for a tyrant's lust?" - the heroine as passive victim; "the firmness of a female hand" - the active heroines of the tales; "quiet cruising o'er the ocean woman" - Byron's "Don Juan" and the woman question; "each was radiant in her proper sphere" - Byron's theory of repression from Greece to the "gynocrasy"; "why, what is virtue if it needs a victim?" - heroic heroines in Regency drama; "my hope was to bring forth heroes" - the fostering of masculine "virtu" by the stoical heroines of the political plays; "daughters of Earth" - the divided self and the heroines of the mythological dramas.

Reviews

`Central to her excellent book Byron's Heroines is the contention that critics have allowed an obsession with the Byronic hero to blind them to his distinctive treatment of female characters. Byron's Heroines is a significant addition to Byron studies, and to our understanding of the ideologies of sexual difference in his time. Original and informed ... She cares about the poems themselves as well as the issues, and writes perceptively about both.
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The New York Review
`This is a fascinating book which has been exhaustively researched ... it is a study long overdue, and one which admirably redresses the balance in its concern to centralize the Byronic heroine.
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John Gilroy, The Byron Journal, 1993
`detailed and fascinating, and forms an excellent extension to the growing collection of politicising studies of Byron
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Cambridge Quarterly
`Franklin's study shows wide-ranging knowledge of both Byron scholarship and feminist criticism. To a synthesis of this essential background she adds an impressive array of fresh insights ... her perceptive commentaries reach well beyond the characters themselves to illuminate the works in which they appear. In fine, Franklin has provided a sound feminist critique in language that even the uninitiated can understand.
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Frederick L. Beaty, Indiana University, Nineteenth Century Literature
`Though a professed feminist, Caroline Franklin was well advised to avoid the cruder polemical assumptions of present-day feminism and to write a historicist study in the best tradition of - both male-authored and female-authored - ideengeschichte. Caroline Franklin examines each of Byron's female protagonists separately ... Each analysis is clear and solid.
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Rolf P. Lessenich, Archiv, 230 Band, 145.Jayrgang, 1.Halbjahresband 1993
`highly original book ... Although this is a fairly technical study, advanced readers interested in Byron's representations of women in the early 19th century will find this book a worthy endeavour.
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M.S. Johnston, Mankato State University, Choice, Apr '93
`Franklin's study shows wide-ranging knowledge of both Byron scholarship and feminist criticism. To a synthesis of this essential background she adds an impressive array of fresh insights ... One of her outstanding achievements lies in demonstrating how Byron's implied responses to "the woman question" differ from or agree with the express positions of others of his day ... her perceptive commentaries reach well beyond the characters themselves to
illuminate the works in whch they appear. In fine, Franklin has provided a sound feminist critique in language that even the uninitiated can understand.
'
Frederick L. Beaty, Indiana University, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48:2, (September 1993)
`The depth and range of Franklin's study of Byron's sexual politics in these works is impressive. Byron's Heroines is provocative. The historical aspect of Franklin's work is detailed and fascinating, and forms an excellent extension to the growing collection of politicising studies of Byron.
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Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Qaurterly, 22 (1993)
`Byron has a celebration all his own: in Caroline Franklin's Byron's Heroines ... a real, live, flaming feminist rallies to his cause.
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Times Educational Supplement
`This is a most valuable contribution to both Byron criticism and the methodology of historicism ... Franklin offers her most fascinating analysis of the ongoing debate in a detailed exposition of the Vicomte J.A.P. Segur's Women: Their Condition and Influence in Society, London, 1803, and the voluminous treatise, History of the Female Sex by the prominent Gottingen philosopher Christoph
Meiners, in the English translation of 1808.'
Anglia
`Caroline Franklin's book is attractive...She sets out clearly what she intends to do...Franklin is...very well informed, lucid, and unpretentious; she discloses her working assumptions and carries the reader with her.'
RES New Series XLVII 185
`Byron's Heroines has combined an intellectual history of gender in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a new look at Byron as a writer of considerable learning, imagination, and scope. ... Byronists and feminists will read this good book - yet its chief audience ought to be those who still question Byron's standing as a great writer and his contribution to that fallible composite that we call Western humanism.'
Studies in Romanticism, January 1997