Celia in Search of a Husband: By a Modern Antique

This ground-breaking nineteenth-century volume is of considerable scholarly interest as an example of a femino-centric popular novel. Celia in Search of a Husband is a high-spirited and entertaining example of an anti-Jacobin novel, written at the height of the backlash against female intellectuals during the Napoleonic wars. Despite this hostile climate, the author sought to acknowledge the importance of female education and independence whilst at the same time endorsing the traditional Christian teaching that a wife should be subordinate to her husband. Although second wave feminists prioritized the progressive writers with whom they more readily identified, more recent scholarship has rightly paid close attention to conservative or moralist writers such as Miss Byron and recognized how influential they were. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this edition of Celia in Search of a Husband contributes to this scholarship on the literary history of women’s writing, and will be a welcome to those with a particularly interest in women’s writing, satiric novels and spoofs, and Jane Austen.

Caroline Franklin is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University. She is an expert on Lord Byron, Romantic-period culture, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century women’s writing and correspondence. She has edited many volumes of rare novels, poetry and travel writing by women, and provided several entries on lesser-known nineteenth-century female novelist, for the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.