Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.

In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were at the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by the time he got there). By the end of the decade Smith and Williams were being cited together more pejoratively, as two of a number of women who came to stand for the amoral, sexually suspect and politically naïve English ‘Jacobins’ who were vilified in the conservative press. Neither were in fact ‘Jacobins’ but they were revolutionary. This book looks at how Smith and Williams earned such reputations and at the politics and poetics of the works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed Romantic and Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise.

Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation. As women were cast into the feminine, maternal role in Romantic national discourse, women like these who defined themselves in other terms found themselves exiled - sometimes literally - from the nation. These wandering women did not rest easily in the family-romance of Romantic nationalism nor could they be reconciled with the models of literary authorship that emerged in the 1790s.

Born in a convent to an unwed mother before adoption was legal in Ireland, Maura O'Sullivan was raised by a "nursing mother." She knew she was different from her two older siblings but her history was never discussed in her childhood home. Her journey in the pursuit of happiness took her from Ireland to England and finally to America. While living in America Maura got what she wanted most in life: a family of her own. "I was going to have a baby whether I was married or not, it was just that important to me," she says. Maura married her American sweetheart, and they raised four daughters together. Jack provided well for his family but he didn't make life easy for Maura and their children. Even so, Maura found a way to live the life she wanted. Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living, but it's one thing to review the details of your life in the privacy of your own home; it's another to share your story with anyone who wants to read about it. As openly and as honestly as she can, Maura gives us the gift of an examined life. By doing so she enriches all of us and will continue to do so long after she takes off on her last great adventure.

When Marge Hall walked up to Roy Johnson and asked him to dance she had no idea what she was about to set in motion. Roy, the boy who skipped school to go fishing, picked blueberries in the mountains, and skated on the frozen ponds of Connecticut, decided right then he was going to marry her. But before he could make Marge his wife, he had a war to fight, letters to write, and doubts to erase, and when he returned from China, where he served as a radio operator on a B-24 bomber, his dream came true. Shortly after their wedding on November 11, 1944, Roy set a much harder goal for himself. "My one and only purpose in life is to make you a good husband, "he told Marge. For the next 65 years he tried his best to do just that.