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From February 1796 until May 1797, The Monthly Magazine, the dissenting journal, edited by John Aikin, ran a series of seventeen questions posed by an anonymous ‘The Enquirer’. It is the third of these questions, published with a lengthy answer and appearing in the third issue of the journal in April 1796, that I wish to take up here. The question was this: ‘Are literary and scientific pursuits suited to the female character?’ The Enquirer, defining himself as a ‘lover of wisdom’, first observes

Anne K. Mellor is Professor Above Scale of English and Women's Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Blake's Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980),Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988),Romanticism and Gender (1993), and Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (2000).

(2001). Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-28.

(2000). Making an exhibition of her self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and nineteenth‐century scripts of female sexuality. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 271-304.

(1996). Righting the wrongs of woman: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 19, Writing women/writing power, pp. 413-424.

This article addresses the female-authored elegy. By far the greatest number of elegies penned by women between 1660 and 1834 confront the loss of a dearly beloved family member or friend. Additionally, it describes Mary Chudleigh's three elegies at length because they provide a brilliant representation of the emotional continuum upon which other female elegists map the work of grieving. At the end of the eighteenth century, the female-authored elegy underwent a significant literary development. In the hands of its most skilled practitioners — Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon, and Felicia Hemans — the poetic elegy became an exploration. The female-authored elegies functioned on occasion as a vehicle of culturally repressed sexual desire. Many of them are more specific in their political critique, taking the occasion to support particular parties, policies or public figures.

ELIZABETH HAMILTON'S SUBTLE AND NUANCED ANALYSIS OF THE INTERSECTION of Hindu and British culture published in 1796 is a core text for our understanding of Romantic orientalism. It is based on an extensive familiarity with Hindu law, literature, religious practice and politics, which Hamilton gained from her brother Charles, a self-taught and passionate orientalist who served under Warren Hastings in India from 1772-1786 before returning to Scotland to translate the Hindu legal code, the Hedaya, into English. It is therefore particularly odd that this novel has been so neglected by scholars of Romantic-era British imperialism. Nigel Leask affords it only a passing (and not entirely accurate) glance in his British Romantic Writers and the East; Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson ignore it in their three-chapter synthetic overview of the issue in Romanticism and Colonialism, as do the other contributors to this volume; and Saree Makdisi makes no mention of Hamilton's novel in his Romantic Imperialism. (1) Nor does Leask rectify this omission of Hamilton's text in his chapter on women travel-writers and the East in his recent Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land,' where he continues to cite her first name incorrectly. (2) Hamilton's novel deserves far more sustained attention than these critics have provided, since it constructs a very different picture of the relationship of Britain to India from the one promoted by such canonical Romantic writers as Byron, Percy Shelley, De Quincey, Coleridge and Scott. This is not to say that Hamilton's novel has been entirely ignored by academic critics and scholars. Both feminist and post-colonialist critics have been attracted to the novel's obvious engagement with the British presence in India presented by a woman. But these critics have tended to reduce the novel to imperialist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the full complexity of Hamilton's satire. Admittedly, at first glance Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) appears to be what Edward Said would call an "orientalizing" text. The novel's Hindu characters--Zaarmilla, Maandaara and Sheermal--arguably conform to Said's influential, if now contested, definition of the western production of the Orient as unscientific, irrational, feminine, childish, submissive, depraved, distant, in contrast to its representation of England as masculine, scientific, rational, Christian and above all civilized. (3) Critics who have chosen to focus on the novel's imperialist dimensions have stressed the Rajah Zaarmilla's naivete, his unreliability, his benighted racism, and above all his unthinking acceptance of the low status of Indian women, whom he eagerly trades in marriage, keeps subservient, denies a useful education, and condemns to sati. In this vein, one could also point out that Zaarmilla is effectively feminized in England, where in public he becomes the object rather than the possessor of the specular gaze, defined as an exotic display for English eyes. These critics, most notably Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, Claire Grogan and Susan Taylor, (4) have finally rested their case on the novel's imperialist endorsement, through the voice of Zaarmilla, of the British rule in India as the salvation of the Hindu people. As Zaarmilla enthuses, Benevolent people of England! it is their desire, that all should be partakers of the same blessings of liberty which they themselves enjoy. It was doubtless with this glorious view, that they sent forth colonies to enlighten, and instruct, the vast regions of America. To disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they cultivated the trans-Atlantic isles: and to rescue our nation from the hands of the Oppressor, did this brave and generous people visit the shores of Hindoostan. (5) As Grundy and Taylor further note, Zaarmilla even credits the British with restoring the laws (163) and saving the artifacts of Hindu culture: "It is by these strangers that the annals of Hindostan, which her barbarian conquerors have sought to obliterate in the blood of her children, shall be restored! …

Part 1 Anna Seward, (1742-1809): sonnet - "By Derwent's rapid stream as oft I strayed,", "An Evening in November", "Autumn", "To Colebrooke Dale". Part 2 Anna Laetitia Barbauld (nee Aikin) (1743-1825): from "Corsica" "Ode to spring" "A Summer Evening's Meditation" "Autumn. A Fragment". Part 3 Hannah More, (1745-1833): from "The Search after Happiness" from "The Search after Happiness". Part 4 Mary Hays, (1760-1843): "An Invocation to the Nightingale" "The Consolation" sonnet - "Ah! let not hope fallacious, airy, wild,". Part 5 Charlotte Smith (nee Turner) (1749-1806): sonnet - "To a Nightingale", "To The South Downs", "On the Departure of the Nightingale", "Composed during a Walk on the Downs". Part 6 Eliza Knipe (later Cobbold) (1767-1824): "On the Lake of Windermere" "Keswick". Part 7 Anne Hunter (nee Home) (1742-1821): "November, 1784" "To the Nightingale". Part 8 Helen Maria Williams, (1762-1827): sonnet - "To Twilight", "To Expression" "An Address to Poetry" sonnet - "To Hope". Part 9 Mary Hunt, (1764-1834): "Written on visiting the Ruins of Dunkeswell Abbey ....". Part 10 Ann Yearsley (nee Cromartie) (1752-1806): "To Mr. ***, an Unlettered poet, on Genius Unimproved" "Anarchy" "Peace" "Dedicated to Louis XIV". Part 11 Mary O'Brien, (fl. 1785-1790): "Ode to Milton". Part 12 Joanna Baillie, (1762-1851): from "A Winter Day" from "A Summer Day" from "Thunder" from "Wind". Part 13 Anna Maria Jones, (nee Shipley) (1748-1829): "Sonnet to Echo" stanzas - "Marie Antoinette's Complaint in Prison" "Ode to Fancy" "Adieu to India". Part 14 Mary Robinson, (nee Darby) (1758-1800): "Ode to the Nightingale" stanzas - "Written between Dover and Calais", "Written after Successive Nights of Melancholy Dreams" "Ode to my Beloved Daughter". Part 15 Ann Radcliffe (nee Ward) (1764-1823): "To the visions of Fancy" "Song of a Spirit" "Morning, on the Sea Shore" "Rondeau". Part 16 Amelia Alderson, (later Opie) (1769-1853): "To Twilight" "Ode to Borrowdale" "Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795" "Stanzas Written under Aeolus's Harp". Part 17 Jane West (nee Iliffe) (1758-1852): "Ode to Imaginations" sonnet - "'Her hair disheveled, and her robe untied,'", "To May". Part 18 Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832)?: "Address to poetry, sonnet to a Sea-Gull". Part 19 Mary Tighe (nee Blachford) (1772-1810): "Written at Scarborough" sonnet - "For me would Fancy now her chaplet twine", "Ye dear associates of my gayer hours" from Psyche - "The Island of Pleasure". Part 20 Barbara Hoole (nee Wreaks, later Hofland) (1770-1844): "Cumberland Rocks" sonnet - "Composed on the Banks of Ulswater" "Composed in a cell, (commonly called the Giant's Cave)" "Lines composed while Climbing some Rocks in Derbyshire". Part 21 Jane Taylor, (1783-1824): "A Town" from "A pair" from "The World in the House". Part 22 Felicia Dorothea Hemans (nee Browne) (1793-1835): "The Voice of Spring" "The Treasures of the. (Part contents)..