This thesis offers a reconsideration of Amelia Opie’s career as a novelist in the light of her developing religious allegiances over the period 1814-1825 in particular. In twentieth-century scholarship, Opie (1769-1853) was often treated primarily as the author of Adeline Mowbray (1805) and discussed in terms of that novel’s relationship with the ideas of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Recent scholarship (Clive Jones, Roxanne Eberle, Shelley King and John B. Pierce) has begun a fuller assessment of her significance, but there is still a need for a thorough discussion of the relationship between her long journey towards the Quakers and her commitment to the novel as a moral and entertaining medium. Many scholars (Gary Kelly, Patricia Michaelson, Anne McWhir and others), following Opie’s first biographer Cecilia Lucy Brightwell (1854), have represented Opie as giving up her glittering literary career and relinquishing fiction-writing completely: this relinquishment has been linked to Quaker prohibitions of fiction as lying. My thesis shows that Quaker attitudes to fiction were more complicated, and that the relationship between Opie’s religious and literary life is, in turn, more complex than has been thought. This project brings evidence from a number of sources which have been overlooked or under-utilised, including a large, under-examined archive of Opie correspondence at the Huntington Library, Opie’s last novel Much to Blame (1824), given critical analysis here for the first time, and the republications which Opie undertook in the 1840s. These sources show that Opie never abandoned her commitment to fiction; that her move to the Quakers was a long and fraught process, but that she retained a place in the fashionable world in spite of her conversion. My Introduction gives a nuanced understanding of Quaker attitudes to fiction, and the first chapter exposes the ‘white lies’ of Opie’s first biographer, Brightwell, and their legacy. I then move on to examine Opie’s early works – Dangers of Coquetry (1790), “The Nun” (1795) and The Father and Daughter (1801) – as she flirts with radicalism in the 1790s, and Adeline Mowbray is explored through a Quaker lens in chapter 3. I juxtapose Opie’s correspondence with her Quaker mentor Joseph John Gurney and the celebrated writer William Hayley with her developing use of the moral-evangelical novel – Temper (1812), Valentine’s Eve (1816) and Madeline (1822) – as Opie was increasingly attracted to the Quakers. Chapter 5 analyses Opie’s anonymous novels – The Only Child (1821) and Much to Blame (1824) – alongside her Quaker works (especially Detraction Displayed (1828)) around the time of her official acceptance to the Quakers (1825). The final chapter investigates how Opie balanced her Quaker belonging with her ongoing commitment to fiction, exemplified in her 1840s republications, which I present in the context of her correspondence with publisher friends Josiah Fletcher and Simon Wilkin, and with Gurney. Opie’s ‘white lies’ of social negotiation reveal her difficulties in maintaining a literary career from the 1790s to the 1840s, but her concerted effort to do so in spite of such struggles provides a highly significant insight into the changing religious and literary climates of this long period.

Historian David Bell recently suggested that scholars reconsider the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) upon modern culture, naming them the first "total war" in modern history. My thesis explores the significance of the wars specifically in the British mourning culture of the period by studying the war literature of four women writers: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans. This paper further asks how these authors contributed to the development of a national consciousness studied by Georg Lukács, Benedict Anderson, and others. I argue that women had a representative experience of non-combatants' struggle to mourn war deaths occurring in relatively foreign lands and circumstances. Women writers recorded and contributed to this representative experience that aided the development of a national consciousness in its strong sense of shared anxieties and grief for soldiers. Excluded physically and experientially, women would have had an especially difficult time attempting to mourn combatant deaths while struggling to imagine the places and manners in which those deaths occurred, especially when no physical bodies came home to "testify" of their loved ones' experiences. Women writers' literary portraits of imagined women mourning those whose bodies never came home provide interesting insights into the strategies employed during the grieving process and ultimately demonstrate their contribution to a collective British consciousness based on mourning. The questions I explore in the first section of this thesis circle around the idea of women as writers and mourners: What were writers saying about war, death, and mourning? What common themes begin to appear in the women's Romantic war literature? And, perhaps most importantly, how did such mourning literature affect the growing sense of nationality coming out of this period? In the second section, I consider more precisely how these literary contributions affected mourning culture when no bodies were present for burial and advanced the development of a national consciousness that recognized the wars' "nobodies." How did women's experiences of being left behind and marginalized in the war efforts prepare them to conceptualize destructive mass deaths abroad, and, conceptualizing them, to mourn them?