Selene: Lady Mount Cashell's Lunar Utopia

Abstract

Building on the ongoing critical recuperation of women writers of the Romantic period, this essay sketches the extraordinary life and literary achievements of an aristocratic Irish woman, before focusing attention on Selene, an unpublished, three-volume novel written in the 1820s. Because it remains unpublished to this day, Selene is known to very few readers, but an analysis of this utopian fantasy's critique of contemporary English politics, social mores and literary standards reveals that it provides many new insights into women's writing during the late Romantic period. The outline of the author's life is relatively well known: as a child, the future Lady Mount Cashell came under the radical influence of her governess, Mary Wollstonecraft, while, as an adult, she lived a scandalous life, parting from her husband and their children, and setting up home with her lover and their two daughters in Italy, where she later offered friendship and refuge to Mary and Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont. However, her achievements as a writer, whose published works included three political pamphlets, four collections of children's stories, an advice manual for mothers and a novel for young women, have received scant critical attention. In Selene, Lady Mount Cashell negotiates her own experiences of early privilege, the pain of an unhappy marriage, and the eventual recuperation of personal equilibrium through a second relationship enjoyed in relative seclusion. However, Selene is much more than a personal meditation on female experience, as Lady Mount Cashell's caustic view of early nineteenth-century English society illuminates aspects of the broader cultural context of the period.