Abstract
Abstract: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1800) has long been understood as the author's most straightforwardly "realist" novel. This article troubles that assumption by returning to the author's deep familiarity with Enlightenment moral philosophy, particularly Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and, in turn, uncovering the novel's strange admixture of Enlightenment rationality and Romantic intuitiveness—a mode of "Romantic realism" that champions fact-based induction, on the one hand, and, on the other, remains supple to epistemological challenges posed against that model by poets (and plagiarizers) such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his theory of imagination's " esemplastic power ."
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