Abstract/Summary

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Augustan mode of satire found its way into the novels of a handful of women writers with ties to radical and Dissenting circles. Historically perceived as a masculine genre with a conservative or regulatory function, satire’s traditional aims were at odds with progressive agendas. Its presence in novels by Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen demands attention to that end. This thesis examines how women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reimagined the style of satire through the emergent form of the novel, approaching satirical heritage in terms of stylistics rather than direct literary influence. Loosely examining novels of the 1790s, the first four chapters consider subjects including the reformative capacity of satire versus sensibility in literary fiction (Inchbald); the limits of satirical style in connection with radical philosophy (Wollstonecraft); satire’s effects on the form of the novel, and the novel’s effects on satire itself (Hays); and satirical style and public discourse (Edgeworth). The impact of the stylistic adaptations these four women undertake can be seen nearly twenty years later, in the two final published novels of Jane Austen, where she borrows the style of gendered satire to present the novels’ patriarchs in terms of vices typically associated with women, levelling the gendered moral distinctions that traditional satire—and traditional novelistic conventions—had cultivated. This thesis positions the style of satire as a lasting literary intervention in the development of the novel, examining both what it afforded and what it demanded from women writing fiction at the dawn of the Romantic period.