Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie

Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie

'"How strange and irrational," thought Adeline, "are the prejudices of society! Because an idle ceremony has not been muttered over me at the altar, I am liable to be thought a woman of vicious inclinations, and to be exposed to the most daring insults."' Encouraged by her mother to pursue an interest in radical social ideas, Adeline Mowbray innocently puts her theories of idealized love into practice. Her attempt to live with the philosopher Frederic Glenmurray outside marriage is condemned by both her mother and society. Adeline and Glenmurray's relationship becomes the focal point for Opie's satire on society's attitudes to education, women, marriage, masculine and feminine codes of honour, filial loyalty and the struggle to justify individual choice. Personal as well as political, Adeline Mowbray (1804) is loosely based on the relationship between Opie's friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Written in a period of conservative reaction in Britain and recalling the earlier radical era of the 1790s the novel offers a gripping exploration of the 'world as it is' and the 'world as it ought to be.'.

Anne McWhir is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the co-editor, with D.L. Macdonald, of The Broadview Anthology of Literature of the Revolutionary Period, 1770-1830, and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Mary Shelley's The Last Man.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192833303
ISBN 10	0192833308
Title	Adeline Mowbray
Author	Amelia Opie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2000-03-01
Number of pages	330
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable