Authority and legitimacy: the cultural context of Lady Caroline Lamb's novels

Wetherall Dickson, Leigh (2006) Authority and legitimacy: the cultural context of Lady Caroline Lamb's novels. Women's Writing, 13 (3). pp. 369-391. ISSN 0969-9082

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Abstract

Disparaging references to Lamb’s personal life have become a substitute for critical engagement with her work; judgments of the woman and her texts have become fused together. Her novels have been summarily dismissed as a by-product of her presumed hysteria, considered to be a direct result of her disastrous relationship with Byron, and as casually and chaotically written as her life as a dissipated aristocrat is often portrayed. This article examines Lamb’s three published novels, Glenarvon 1816, Graham Hamilton 1822 and Ada Reis 1823, and the recurring theme of the necessity of aristocratic moral reform, and re-examines them in the cultural context in which they were produced, thereby demonstrating that these novels had were produced with a specific communicative intent that was intended for her imagined ideal reader, that of her own milieu of Whig oppositional politics.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	nobility, English fiction
Subjects:	Q200 Comparative Literary studies Q300 English studies R900 Others in European Languages, Literature and related subjects
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User:	EPrint Services
Date Deposited:	30 May 2008 14:13
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 19:22
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2911

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