Welcome to 4434: Romantic Woman Authors!

This course focuses on women writers and politics in the Romantic period, 1770-1830, in Britain. This topic goes against what you might expect about a course about women writers in this period, considering that women could not vote, had no property rights, could not open a bank account, could not attend university, could not be elected to public office, and had very few socially acceptable employment opportunities. Despite these facts, there was an enormous amount of literature in the Romantic period that directly engages political and social issues, and much of it was written and published by woman barred from official avenues to political power. Indeed, as you will quickly learn in this course, literature was the place where disenfranchised people—women, working class men, and people of colour—could voice their political opinions and influence the course of legal, political, and social reform. From the abolition of the slave trade to Britain’s growing empire and from education to international policy, women made their voices heard and their opinions known through novels, plays, poems, and nonfiction prose. This course brings women writers (including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley) into dialogue with their more famous male contemporaries (including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and William Blake), revealing how people without access to formal education or political influence changed the world with literature.