SOURCE: Introduction to Amelia Alderson Opie: Worldling and Friend, in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol, XIV, Nos. 1-2, The Collegiate Press, October, 1932-January, 1933, pp. xi-xv.

In the following essay, MacGregor discusses Opie's moralistic purpose in writing as well as Opie's response to issues of her day.

I have been reading over my journal. Amazing! It is really now as long as a book, yet it contains nothing but the history of a weak woman's heart. But is not that heart a world to its possessor? . . . after all, is there, can there be any history more interesting than a history of the affections? . . .

—Madeline.

Amelia Alderson Opie, whose life and works the following chapters chronicle, was one of that group of minor novelists who, living through the Revolutionary Period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflected in their writings the manifold ideas of their time...