Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh’s literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott’s. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England’s economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

"Christian Isobel Johnstone, called "the bravehearted lady" by Thomas Carlyle, was editor for more than a decade of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, a journal famous for its vigorous liberal viewpoints and incisive literary reviews. In 1815 Johnstone also became the author of one of the most extraordinary novels of the Romantic era, Clan-Albin. The story is centered around the childhood and adolescence of its orphan hero, Norman Macalbin, who leaves the poverty of the Highlands to volunteer for the army and journey in Ireland and Spain: but throughout the novel it is the voices of the strong female characters - Lady Augusta, Monimia, Flora and others - that we hear most clearly. These bring to us Johnstone's lament for the loss of Highland culture and scorn for the emergent southern mercantile classes, and portray war as a terrible tragedy whose glorification is unforgivable. Written in the year of Waterloo, Clan-Albin is a unique Scottish novel by an outstanding and neglected female voice."--BOOK JACKET.

Bringing together top specialists in the field, this edited volume challenges the theory that the eighteenth-century British intellectual women known as the Bluestockings were an isolated phenomenon spanning the period from the 1750s through the 1790s. On the contrary, the contributors suggest, the Bluestockings can be conceptualized as belonging to a chain of interconnected networks, taking their origin at a threshold moment in print media and communications development and extending into the present. The collection begins with a definition of the Bluestockings as a social role rather than a fixed group, a movement rather than a static phenomenon, an evolving dynamic reaching into our late-modern era. Essays include a rare transcript of a Bluestocking conversation; new, previously unknown Bluestockings brought to light for the first time; and descriptions of Bluestocking activity in the realms of natural history, arts and crafts, theatre, industry, travel, and international connections. The concluding essay argues that the Blues reimagined and practiced women’s work in ways that adapted to and altered the course of modernity, decisively putting a female imprint on economic, social, and cultural modernization. Demonstrating how the role of the Bluestocking has evolved through different historical configurations yet has structurally remained the same, the collection traces the influence of the Blues on the Romantic Period through the nineteenth century and proposes the reinvention of Bluestocking practice in the present.