Like any movement, Romanticism came about as a response to the zeitgeist, shaped by the initial democratic zeal of the French Revolution, while simultaneously pushing back against the modernization of the Industrial Revolution. For many English writers, the fall of French monarchy was a blessing, the beginning of something grander in store for Europe and indeed the world; promoting liberty and human rights, and displacing oppressive regimes. The idea that every individual has inherent worth was furthered by such Romantic writers as Wordsworth, who was sympathetic to the plight of the growing poor. Class mobility may have been facilitated by the Industrial Revolution, but many farmers would become destitute as a result. This, in turn, resulted in the Romantic fascination with nature and its opposition to humanity, placing emphasis and a more wholesome living experience on rustic life, and how nature can better us as individuals.

These elements of the movement, however, were more concerned with by its male followers. The liberty and democratization which the Romantic period proposed, shaped the female writers of the day  in particular, who wrote about education and women's rights, such as Mary Wollestonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But not all female Romantics' works can be characterized by this activism. Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Felicia Hemans were all female poets that were possibly just as, if not more, popular than their male contemporaries, who were concerned with the power of the imagination. If anything, though, the Romantic period seems to have been an emboldening era for female writers. Not to say that there weren't any women writing before this period, but that the spirit of that age was more in tune with and receptive towards female disenfranchisement.