The subjects of this book, five English women writers of the 1790s, are no longer the unrepresented underside of the English Romantic canon, as they undoubtedly were even ten years ago. Critical studies of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft, in particular, have proliferated in the last decade. The poetry of Charlotte Smith, if not her prose fiction, is now relatively well known due to the services of Stuart Curran and others who have seen fit to edit and analyse the work which was barely noticed for two hundred years. The prose of Helen Maria Williams and Hannah More has been less researched, although these writers too are coming into focus: the former principally for her poetry, the latter to illustrate that not all women writers of the period were feminists, or that not all women writers who have been appropriated by feminism were republicans or even democrats.

If they are no longer unrepresented, they have not by any means been deemed ‘representative’: neither of the literary movement we now nervously call Romanticism, nor of the ‘Romantic Englishness’ which until the late 1970s was largely associated, in the academy as well as popularly, with Wordsworth and Nature. Since then, contributions by cultural historians, postcolonialists and feminists have ensured that to study ‘English’ anywhere in the world in the 1990s is to be confronted with difference and contestation, not unity and coherence.