Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and the Daughter (Eighteenth-Century Literature)

This edition pairs Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) with Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray; or the Mother and the Daughter (1804). Emma Courtney represents the radical side of the debates in England about appropriate behavior for women in love at the end of the eighteenth century. Adeline Mowbray has been more often read as a warning about the dangers of putting into practice the radical reforms advocated by women like Hays. Reading together these novels by women who were both close friends and associates of Mary Wollstonecraft in the heady revolutionary days complicates their easy division into "radical" and "conservative" or "Jacobin" and "anti-Jacobin" categories. Debates of the time on abolition, childhood education, rakish masculinity, and the consequences for women of sexuality outside of marriage are central to both of these novels, and readily explored by offering both under a single cover. The College Publishing edition includes an introductory essay detailing the importance and problems of biographical approaches to these two novels in particular, and works by women writers in general. Additional short essays are interpolated throughout, providing helpful contextual material, while the varied responses of eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers are represented by a selection of contemporary reviews of each novel in the appendix.