Description:
This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen; and the reaction to Byronism of the Brontës and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It thus challenges previous critics' segregation of the male Romantic poets from their female peers, whose agenda was perceived to be different: domestic and social.
Review Quotes:
"Literary celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain was a male game, and... famous woman writers played this game in order to change it. The risk of this strategy is one made especially evident in Franklin's book.
[This book] provide[s] nuanced accounts of how women writers resisted masculine models of influence, but also demonstrate[s] the danger of being seduced by the very paradigm, or paragon, you set out to reform." - Times Literary Supplement
"Franklin displays two outstanding strengths. First, she reads intertextuality through politics, showing that women's novels used Byron to stage major debates about government, the status of the political subject, and the rights of the individual in society.
Second, she reads the individual texts of an author in terms of her whole career, so that we see not snapshots but a trajectory. Since most of the writers she treats were less prolific than their Victorian successors, she can effectively analyze the novels of each within a single chapter." - Andrew Elfenbein, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota
'...Franklin's The Female Romantics provides such an effective outline of women writers' responses to Byronism that scholars interested in Byron's reception history will find much of note here.' - European Romantic Review
"The study may well be considered the first major contribution to the reclamation of Byron for researchers and students of gender since Susan Wolfson'sBorderlines (2006), and Franklin's own Byron's Heroines (1992). .... Engaging as it does with two major cross-currents of Byron scholarship, the book would be of interest to dedicated Byronists, as well as to students and scholars working in any aspect of nineteenth-century gender studies. The Female Romantics is a timely piece of research that should be considered as an invitation to scholars to engage more closely with the possibilities Byron's literary relations with women hold." - Anna Camilleri, University of Oxford in The Byron Journal
"Franklin establishes what many scholars have long believed, that women's fiction of the early and mid-nineteenth century responded to Byron and his poetry in varying ways, depending on if the woman writer was engaging with the poet as a model for religious, political, national, or sexual freedom. The work is organized chronologically by author and sub-genre, focusing in turn on travel writing, the gothic, oriental tales, love stories, bildungsroman, spiritual pilgrimage, and political crusade.
... Franklin's The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists and Byronism is a well-written, convincingly argued study that helps to bridge the gap between two time periods stereotypically thought to be at odds in terms of literary history, the Romantics and the Victorians. Franklin demonstrates very well that Byronism is one of the unifying connective tissues running throughout the long century." - Denise Tischler Millstein, Stephen F. Austin State University in Studies in the Novel