SOURCE: "Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology," in Ariel, Vol. 12, No. 4, October, 1981, pp. 3-24.

In the following excerpt, Kelly argues that the writings of Opie (among others) demonstrate an adherence to traditional social values in the moral and outcome of their fictions, but also a questioning of those values in their examination of the lives of the central characters who suffer because of those values.

The first few decades of the nineteenth century may be said to constitute the second phase of the invasion or appropriation of novel writing by large numbers of women—the first phase being the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the period of what J. M. S. Tompkins has dubbed "the English popular novel." In that first phase the decade of the 1790's—the decade of the Revolution and the reaction to it in England—was...