SOURCE: "Discharging Debts: The Moral Economy of Amelia Opie's Fiction," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XI, No. 4, Autumn, 1980, pp. 198-203.

In the following essay, Kelly asserts that the underlying pattern of Opie's prose fiction is the heroine's incurring of a real or apparent moral, social, or financial debt, which is repaid with inner suffering and some public expression of this suffering, and which is terminated by reconciliation with the creditor.

Amelia Opie (1769-1853) was one of the most popular fiction writers of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and could be termed a representative woman novelist of her day—representative in her social background (although she was a Non-conformist), experience, and class, but more important, representative in the subjects and forms of her fiction. In terms of skill and originality as a fiction-writer, she falls somewhere between the best and the worst women writers of her...