‘My mite for its protection’: The Conservative Woman as Action Hero in the Writings of Charlotte West

Abstract

Charlotte West's A Ten Years' Residence in France (1821) forms part of a tradition of writing about the French Revolution, yet its idiosyncratic narrator renders the text unusual. The text is a blend of travel narrative, memoir and quasi‐Gothic adventure novel. West's presentation of herself as a royalist heroine constitutes a re‐imagining of women's role within the public sphere. Her privileging of the active female political agent might seem to sit uneasily with her royalist politics, but it is within its blend of radical feminism and political conservatism that the significance of this text lies.