‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’: Meta-Discourses and Female Genealogies in Late Eighteenth-Century English Novels

This chapter explores the generic elements of novels written by women writers during the last three decades of the eighteenth century in England and their alterations in forms and content: from sentential novel to gothic romance, moral tales, tales of real life, sentimental novel, and novel of manners. Such narratives have been acknowledged as fundamental in shaping a genealogy of women novelists, whose narrative technique proved to be very influential in the history of English fiction in the early period of Romanticism. Among the many names who peopled the vast panorama of English novel of the period, this chapter discusses in particular the works and narrative technique of Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. While their production resist easy categorization, these writers deploy conventions and innovations offering a new representation of British social milieu according to their contemporary ideology. In fact, their literary strategies can be used to contextualize their literary outputs within the developmental trajectory of the narrative genre that seems to emerge thanks to literary borrowing, generic crossover, and contamination. In doing so, I would situate women novelists of the period as central innovators of Romantic fiction.