Reinventing Liberty

Abstract

Walter Scott is often regarded as the first historical novelist. Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning the formulation of political change and British national identity and its response to political change. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as ‘land of liberty’. Drawing on the new ways of writing history in this period, upon stadial history, antiquarianism, and debates concerning historical evidence, Reinventing Liberty analyses the anxieties caused by the rise of commerce and the demands for political change. It explores how historical novelists from Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe interrogated the idea of an ancient constitution. It examines the radical energies of the historical novel in post-French Revolution debate and the genre’s position as forerunner to the national tale. It then demonstrates how such ideas recuperated by more conservative historical novelists, who redirected historical concern from issues of individual liberty to matters of nation and empire and who emphasized a Christian version of chivalry. Finally, it positions Scott in relation to this complex tradition. The result is a new definition of the historical novel and of its role in the construction of the national myth of Britain as nation of gradual political change.