This chapter looks at the work of John and Michael Banim, who emerged as important Catholic novelists in the late 1820s. Their work attempted to capture the energy of O’Connellite politics in fiction, blending rhetorical set pieces with melodramatic incident. Public speech and oratory become centrally important to their work, and the influence of Richard Lalor Shiel on John Banim in particular becomes clear on reading his work.

This chapter looks at a minor controversy in the life of Charles Robert Maturin to consider his work in the light of sectarian tensions during the ‘Second Reformation’: the energised push by the Church of Ireland to convert the Catholic population in the 1820s. The role eloquence plays in Maturin’s work will be looked at and considered in relation to wider issues surrounding religious rhetoric and Gothic writing.

This introduction provides an introduction to the historical and theoretical frameworks for looking at Irish literature in the Romantic period. It considers the place of the Irish language in characterising Irish eloquence, and argues that British critics also linked Irish eloquence to Gothic excess. It introduces some of the main authors that will be looked at in greater depth later, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, and Charles Maturin.

This chapter looks at the work of Sydney Owenson, focusing on two novels, The Wild Irish Girl and Woman; or Ida of Athens. It considers the way in which Owenson crafted a powerful model of female eloquence in response to the perceived failures of more mainstream political speech. It looks at the legacy of the Volunteer movement of the 1780s as well as the Irish-language background of her work. It also notes the publication of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, an important rhetorical treatise, and the links between his work and Owenson.

This chapter analyzes Lane’s clever use of combinations of geographical, temporal and formal markers in his titles, alternative titles and subtitles to indicate to borrowers and buyers what kind of story a volume contained and explains how this book’s chapters follow and explore the taxonomy he designed. The second section describes the construction of Lane’s principal genres and the sophisticated methods of imitative writing used to compose them. These overlaid romance with realism and made repetition-with-difference a primary mode of communication to engender the Press’s characteristically innovative, modular and debating texts. The chapter concludes by using Clara Reeve’s arguments in The Progress of Romance (1785) to contrast the Aesthetics of Originality which we have inherited from the Romantics with the Aesthetics of Reuse which had been used since the Renaissance to notice and evaluate the “beauties” of imitative writing, and which ordinary readers still use today.

This chapter shows how Minerva authors championed the Press, taught readers how to read them and helped to shift the culture in proto-Victorian ways. It collects together the solutions that women authors proposed to the range of domestic, social and political issues they tackled, argues that their iterative imitations created a community of readers, as well as of writers, and evaluates Minerva Press fiction by the Aesthetics of Reuse.

Implicitly addressing the French Revolution, most of these Tales advocated avoiding revolution in Britain by changing the culture and composition of the ruling class. Critiquing the mores and rule of the aristocracy, Eliza Parsons, Maria Hunter, Mary Ann Hanway, Mary Charlton and anonymous others advocated admitting capable, genteel, nouveau riche merchants and professionals, or sometimes humane and competent country gentlemen, into the ruling elite. They also intimated that elite culture should consist of the proto-Victorian values championed by their exemplary merchants, professionals and/or country gentlemen and independent working women and by the marriage of “manners and morals” they modeled. Placing their exemplary protagonists in the wealthy mercantile, professional and gentry classes and showing these groups socializing and intermarrying accords with recent scholarly accounts of the conduct of these classes in the provinces, as they began to consolidate into a Victorian upper middle class.

Addressing adversity and hardships that readers were likely to encounter in ordinary life (falls into poverty or bankruptcy, loss of parents, lover, caste and home, malignant misrepresentations, sexual harassment, domestic cruelty), these fictions were described as novels. In modeling the idealized responses of characters from the mercantile and professional ranks or from the lesser gentry to suffering and misfortune, Eliza Parsons, Jane West, Elizabeth Bonhote, Mrs. Gunning, Elizabeth Helme, Anna Maria Bennett, Mary Meeke, Ann Howell, Isabella Kelly, Susannah Rowson and many anonymous authors promoted new, proto-Victorian values. Novels of Education addressed issues of parenting and upbringing up to and including courtship and centered on debates about filial obedience, especially in choice of a spouse. Marital Domestic Fiction debated issues related to adultery, divorce, widowhood, spinsterhood, and second marriages. Female Biography combined the two with elements of other genres to follow one or more characters through a “Life.”

This chapter shows how, contrary to modern assumptions, the Press distinguished between Historical and “Gothic” or Terror Fiction and how, contrary to what Romantic critics pretended, Minerva’s women authors ridiculed and dismissed Walpolean Gothic with its specters and clanking chains. Eliza Parsons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, Mary Meeke, Isabella Kelly, Agnes Mulgrave, Regina Maria Roche and anonymous others innovated, instead, by displacing the language of terror to the “unnatural” or criminal acts that families hid from public view – primarily husbands’ sadistic domestic abuse, incest, bigamy and fratricide – while inflecting “Gothic Romance” into the Mystery Story. They also imported and developed the “German” uncanny in a line leading straight to Collins, Bradden, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Poe, and taught readers to be skeptical both of names and of stories.

Lane ignored Perrault in favor of repeatedly publishing and repurposing his rival seventeenth-century French conteuses, most notably Mme D’Aulnoy. While addressing many of the same domestic and political issues as Minerva Terror Fiction and Minerva Historicals, these contes de fée unsentimentally performed their promise, “Whatever you wish you shall have,” while warning readers to be careful what they wished for. The second section considers novel Minerva fictions that preempted nineteenth-century realism by infusing magical fairy-tale materials into novels conducted in the real world.

Minerva Historicals told something like a sequential counter-history of England from the earliest attacks of the Vikings to the Monmouth Rebellion against Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Focusing on moments of crisis, conflict and war, they debated pressing contemporary issues of monarchical succession, political legitimacy, power, violence, loyalty, treason, ambition, war and civil war in disguised censor-evading ways. Centering their fiction on family relationships within and between noble or royal houses gave these histories a domestic cast, but this accurately reflected the historical reality of monarchical and baronial government before Parliament gained ascendancy over the royal household during the nineteenth century, and wrote women at all ranks back into history. The last section shows Anna Maria Mackenzie, Agnes Musgrave and anonymous others answering criticism of the genre by arguing the superior truth of historical fiction to supposedly “true” conjectural histories and teaching readers how to evaluate an historical narrative’s relation to fact.