Romantic-era letter writing and courtship manuals gave readers templates to copy and rules to follow. They promised readers would be safe if they adhered to engagements’ forms and conventions. In contrast, Austen uses broken, secret, and pretend engagements to show that manipulative characters counterfeit forms and conventions to create the illusion of rule following. She suggests that readers can protect themselves by understanding that rules are signs signifying meaning within specific social contexts and learning to judge the character and identify the motivation of whoever deploys those signs. This article argues that Austen's engagements are part of a larger project of teaching readers how to think rather than what to think. From the epistolary Lady Susan to the free indirect discourse of Sense and Sensibility and Emma, Austen's experiments with narrative occur alongside and facilitate this project as she positions readers in different ways to achieve this pedagogical effect.
This article presents circumstantial evidence identifying thematic and formal similarities between The Woman of Colour and the work of Elizabeth Hamilton in order to consider the implications of white abolitionist authorship and what it means for recent readings of the novel, notably those in the recent ECF special issue on the novel that emphasize its Black Atlantic energies. Accordingly, I will argue for a rhetoric of accumulation consisting of distinct Biblical Christian lessons and satirical motifs to suggest that if we consider that Elizabeth Hamilton wrote The Woman of Colour, we can complicate the dichotomous liberal/conservative, Black/white readings to see how the novel refuses to centre white women's abolitionist goals by exposing their failure and simultaneously centres the faith-based fight of its Black protagonist on behalf of her people. The novel illustrates how white Britain has failed to live up to its professions of faith just as it has failed the demands of its faith to abolish slavery. It also illustrates how women of colour live and thrive by their faith, making it a weapon to combat the injustices of slavery.
This article reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel not as a failed fragment but as a metaphysical structure shaped by Romantic theories of polarity and magnetic force. Drawing on Owen Barfield's reading of Coleridge's metaphysics and contemporary discourses on animal magnetism, the study reframes prayer in Christabel as an energetic signal rather than symbolic utterance. The spectral and the feminine are reconfigured as relational intensities rather than binary figures, while the poem's fragmentary form is read as an enactment of philosophical hesitation. By aligning Christabel with Romantic-era scientific and metaphysical inquiry, this article proposes a model of ‘magnetic poetics’ – in which poetic meaning is generated not through resolution, but through sustained suspension. The ghostly, the erotic, and the immaterial are treated not as narrative devices, but as signs of metaphysical transmission, reframing Christabel as an experiment in poetic immortality.
