Talk:Amelia Opie

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"The biography based on Brightwell is not only dated but also carefully presented to play down Amelia Opie's radicalism during the years surrounding the French Revolution. She was indeed part of a coterie with William Godwin, Elizabeth Inchbald and Thomas Holcroft, and was present at the Treason Trials of 1794. Her novel Adeline Mowbray (1805) explores the pleasures of an unmarried partnership and contrasts them with the tyranny of marriage. She also assisted Elizabeth Fry (nee Gurney) in her prison visiting, although both of them felt they were achieving very little (MacGregor, Margaret Eliot, "Amelia Alderson Opie, Worldling and Friend", Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 14 (1933), 3-127, p. 92). A letter of 13 Jan 1830 to Robert Southey attempts to interest him in the issue of hospital reform, although his response was lukewarm as one might expect (Wordsworth Collection, Grasmere). In later life, as a Quaker, she was active in the Anti-Slavery Movement and can be seen in Haydon's group portrait of the 1840 convention in a prodigous poke bonnet. The picture is currently hanging at the National Portrait Gallery. She conducted a vigorous correspondence all her life with various political and intellectual figures including Whewell, Cuvier, Lafayette, Brougham, Hayley, Gurney and others, as well as family. These letters are extant in over forty archival locations but have been collected into an annotated index forming part of my thesis (C. Jones, "The Life and Prose Works of Amelia Opie, 1769-1853", Open University, 2001). Clive Jones"