Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is a study of five writers—Mary Wollstone-craft, Mary Hays, Helen
Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith—who
“politicized the domestic or sentimental novel.” A seven-page
preface outlines some feminist-theoretical perspectives, and a 28-page
introduction sketches conservative and radical English responses to the
French Revolution and the gender politics involved in these responses.
The balance of the study consists of readings of the novels and a
two-page conclusion.

The readings, individually useful as discussions of neglected texts,
tell much the same story several times over, albeit with variations that
cumulatively suggest a larger picture. That larger picture is never
brought into clear focus, because the conclusion is little more than a
gesture of exhaustion. The result is three-quarters of a really good
book.