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The Delicate Distress (1769) focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage - the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands. At the story's center is the deep distress of Emily Woodville, a virtuous young newlywed who suspects her husband of infidelity with a French marchioness from his past. Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien regime, Elizabeth Griffith takes the epistolary novel of sensibility in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and re-imagines it from a feminist perspective that centers on strong, intelligent, and virtuous women. Two sisters exchange letters about urgent ethical questions concerning love, marriage, morality, art, the duties of wives and husbands, and passion versus reason, while two men correspond about the same subjects. The Delicate Distress is one of the earliest novels to explore the psychology of characters who observe and reflect but engage in no grand public actions.
Focusing on the ways in which women writers from across the political spectrum engage with and adapt Wollstonecraft's political philosophy in order to advocate feminist reform, Andrew McInnes explores the aftermath of Wollstonecraft's death, the controversial publication of William Godwin's memoir of his wife, and Wollstonecraft's reception in the early nineteenth century. McInnes positions Wollstonecraft within the context of the eighteenth-century female philosopher figure as a literary archetype used in plays, poetry, polemic and especially novels, to represent the thinking woman and address anxieties about political, religious, and sexual heterodoxy. He provides detailed analyses of the ways in which women writers such as Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth negotiate Wollstonecraft's reputation as personal, political, and sexual pariah to reformulate her radical politics for a post-revolutionary Britain in urgent need of reform. Frances Burney's The Wanderer and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, McInnes suggests, work as state-of-the-nation novels, drawing on Wollstonecraft's ideas to explore a changing England. McInnes concludes with an examination of Mary Shelley's engagement with her mother throughout her career as a novelist, arguing that Shelley gradually overcomes her anxiety over her mother's stature to address Wollstonecraft's ideas with increasing confidence.