Belinda (Annotated)

Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) is a searching novel of manners that follows its young heroine through the moral and social entanglements of fashionable London, testing sentimental ideals against reason, education, and self-command. Written in a lucid, ironic, and didactic style, the novel participates in the tradition of late eighteenth-century moral fiction while revising the courtship plot thr...