JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. Century Fiction (1991), The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (1992), Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1994), and English Literary History (1995). This essay is excerptedfrom a book-length study she is completing on lateeighteenth-century novels by women.W H^^ HEN MARIA EDGEWORTH entitled the original sketch of VY Belinda "Abroad and at Home," she demarcated an opposition between the public, or artificial, female self and the private, or genuine, one. The sketch revolves around Lady Delacour, a character distinguished by "the contrast between [her] apparent prosperity and real misery... At home she is wretched; abroad she assumes the air of exuberant gaiety" ("Sketch" 480). Lady Delacour suffers from breast cancer, the consequence of a wound she received when dueling with another woman while they were cross-dressed. Reflecting her sexual ambiguity and her general resistance to domesticity, "the hideous spectacle" of the breast marks Lady Delacour's "incurable" dissipation of "mind" before she dies (481). The events teach Belinda, Lady Delacour's young friend and protegee, that "happiness at Home" is preferable to "happiness Abroad" (483).In the novel that emerged from the sketch in 1801, Lady Delacour's breast presents the same "hideous spectacle" (32), and her sexually ambiguous behavior is compounded by homoerotic insinuations. But instead of dying, she recovers after revealing that her indecorum is only an act; her "natural character" is that of a "domestic woman" (105). This cure allows Lady Delacour to reunite with her husband and child and then to settle the domestic futures of colonial characters never introduced in the sketch. By the novel's end, Lady Delacour has helped expel Belinda's Creole suitor and reward an English plantocrat, and the allusions to "home" and "abroad" broaden to suggest the complex ways in which late-eighteenth-century notions of sexual difference furthered English colonial interests by influencing the definitions of nation and race.Typically recognized as the first Irish novelist, Edgeworth has in recent years become a visible subject of feminist and colonial studies.' But few 214 This content downloaded from 155.97.178.73 on Fri, 28 Nov 2014 14:50:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Susan C. Greenfield critics have noticed that although Belinda, Edgeworth's first "domestic" novel, takes place in England, it centrally concerns the problem of the West Indies. In the introduction to the recent Oxford University Press edition of the novel, Kathryn Kirkpatrick calls attention to the West Indian characters.Her app...