While literary scholars have written extensively about sensibility in the past two decades, most of the studies have treated either the history of sensibility itself or how it interacted with a particular aspect of English culture and literature, such as sexuality or politics. My project instead examines how a single author, Maria Edgeworth, used sensibility in her writing over the course of her career. I analyze the use of sensibility in three of her novels: Belinda (1801), her first full-length novel; The Absentee (1812), her influential Irish national tale, written at the height of her popularity in the middle years of her career; and Helen (1834), her last novel. This analysis illustrates the changing attitude of both Edgeworth and English society to sensibility and its representations in literature. In Belinda, Edgeworth uses sensibility to demonstrate the virtue and superiority of the characters who possess it, and also to rehabilitate the concept itself. She differentiates between mere affectation and true sensibility by creating both positive and negative examples of sensibility in Belinda – characters clearly possess true sensibility, and those who only pretend to it. In The Absentee, Edgeworth adheres much more closely to the conventions of sentimental fiction than she had in her previous society novels. In my discussion of The Absentee, I demonstrate how Edgeworth uses the conventions of sentiment both to make Irish culture accessible to her English audience and to justify the Irish estate system which put Anglo-Irish landowners in a position of authority over native Irish tenants. My final section focuses on Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, which marks a return to the genre of the society novel with which she began her career. While Edgeworth still uses sensibility as a sign of virtue in Helen, she is also much more interested than previously in the interplay between education and inborn qualities of personality – the very qualities whose existence she was so skeptical of in her education manual, Practical Education, published two years before she began her career as a fiction writer.

in English The aim of this thesis is to interpret and categorize the lesser known novel Thaddeus of Warsaw by the Scottish author Jane Porter. The novel is characterised by the use of several genre conventions - most importantly those commonly found in the conservative anti-jacobin novel or national tale, historical novel and novel of sensibility. Porter's novel is interpreted from all three perspectives and also compared to other relevant novels from roughly the same period: Self- Control by Mary Brunton, The Old English Baron by Clary Reeve and The Wild Irish Girl by Lady Morgan. The comparison aims at the contextualization of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the observation of similarities and differences in the approach to certain themes or motives. The most important motives is that of a trial that shows the character of the protagonist in action, continuity, universality and even a certain parabolic nature of history, an emphasis on virtue and the use of sentimental conventions to portray the emotions of characters. This analysis is preceded by an interpretation of two authorial prefaces. The new one (from 1831) claims that the work it comments on is a historical novel published even before Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, usually considered the first historical novel. The older preface published alongside...