Amelia Opie

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Standard Name: Opie, Amelia
Birth Name: Amelia Alderson
Married Name: Amelia Opie
Pseudonym: N.
AO , who was publishing at the end of the eighteenth century and during the earlier nineteenth century, is best known as a novelist, but was also a dramatist, poet, and short-story writer. The opinions expressed in her writings are often reactionary in gender terms, though she was brought up a Unitarian and later became a Quaker and an active Abolitionist.
Photograph of a painting of Amelia Opie by her husband, John Opie, 1798. She is depicted from the waist up, against a background that is mainly dark with a landscape scene visible in the distance. She wears a simple white dress with a V-shaped neckline that is trimmed with white ruffles. Her brown hair is pulled back, with bangs, and a braid across the top, acting as a headband. She holds a straw hat wrapped in gauzy black fabric in her lap. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Elizabeth B. Lester
Both these novels feature French and Latin tags in their text, but lack epigraphs at the head of chapters. The Quakers, which Garside calls Opie -esque, is written in a confident, literary style and...
Textual Features Catherine Gore
The title-page quotes Byron pronouncing shame to the land of the Gaul.
Gore, Catherine. The Lettre de Cachet; and, The Reign of Terror. J. Andrews.
title-page
A preface combats the general prejudice against a single volume
Gore, Catherine. The Lettre de Cachet; and, The Reign of Terror. J. Andrews.
iii
by citing works of fiction which are short but widely admired...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Christian Isobel Johnstone
Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine was heavily political in content, while Tait's was designed to have greater appeal to the general reader.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Between 1832 and 1846 (when she retired) CIJ contributed over four hundred articles to the...
Reception Susan Ferrier
SF 's protagonists were included with those of Jane Austen , Frances Burney , Amelia Opie , Ann Radcliffe and others in W. D. Howells 's Heroines of Fiction, 1901.
Publishing Ann Batten Cristall
Subscribers included Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother , Ann Jebb , the future Amelia Opie , Anna Maria Porter , Mary Wollstonecraft and her sister, Mary Hays and her sister, a Mrs Spence who...
Publishing Emma Marshall
EM participated to the full in her Quaker forebears' habit of commemorating the dead in writing. She wrote an article of personal reminiscence on Amelia Opie (whom she remembered as elegant and commanding in appearance)...
Publishing Anna Jane Vardill
The popularity of this formula had endured for generations, from Mark Akenside (The Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) and Thomas Warton (The Pleasures of Melancholy, 1747), through Samuel Rogers (The Pleasures...
Publishing Sarah Harriet Burney
While struggling to finish this work, SHB called it my own eternal rubbish
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
130
and my long plague.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
153
By October 1811 she felt she had her plot organised and almost all her allocations of...
politics Marion Reid
In June 1840, MR attended the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London, together with Anna Brownell Jameson , Amelia Opie , and Lady Byron . She was the only Scotswoman present.
Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Scolar Press.
xii
Ewan, Elizabeth et al. The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women : From the Earliest Times to 2004. Edinburgh University Press.
MR was shocked...
politics Anna Brownell Jameson
ABJ went to the LondonWorld Anti-Slavery Convention in the company of Lady Byron , Amelia Opie , and Marion Reid .
Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Scolar Press.
xii
politics Annabella Plumptre
Three years later, in July 1794, the sisters stood on a platform with Amelia Alderson , providing support as she made an anti-Whig, pro-Jacobin speech at Norwich.
Plumptre, Anne. “Introduction”. Something New, edited by Deborah McLeod, Broadview, p. vii - xxix.
ix-x
politics Anne Plumptre
Three years later, in July 1794, both sisters stood on a platform with Amelia Alderson , providing support as she made an anti-Whig, pro-Jacobin speech at Norwich.
Plumptre, Anne. “Introduction”. Something New, edited by Deborah McLeod, Broadview, p. vii - xxix.
ix-x
Literary responses Lady Caroline Lamb
William Lamb worried intensely about the probable reception of Ada Reis, particularly the scenes in hell, and he tried to enlist William Gifford of the Quarterly as an ally in pressuring Caroline to tone...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
In the early 1820s BH seems to have been at the apex of her career. She was appreciated not only by her friend Mary Russell Mitford (who believed that nobody else could combine so much...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Opie, Amelia. The Warrior’s Return, and Other Poems. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808.
Opie, Amelia. Valentine’s Eve. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816.