I began with the idea that there are, essentially, two ways in which we might understand food in literary texts. The first, for the last century informed by psychoanalysis, sees food as a manifestation of love, a confirmation (which may be self-administered) that the eater is deserving. Eating, in this reading, is a way of both constructing and imagining a ‘subjectivity’ that has become steadily more problematic over the last thirty years of literary theory.³ It is in this tradition that recent scholarship on Romanticism and food has tended to work, attending to the bodies in the poems of Wordsworth,...

UntilThe Wanderer, there is not much food in Burney’s fiction, but there are many tables. Until Juliet, her heroines rarely eat, and certainly rarely eat anything in particular, any specified foodstuff rather than ‘breakfast’ or ‘supper’, but they come dutifully to the table three or four times a day, and at periods of crisis flee it in distress almost as frequently. There is no simple meaning or function of the dining table in Burney’s first three novels – it is where people perform their chosen or enforced roles, endure prosecution or attempt defence and display authentic or assumed status...

Judith Schneid Lewis and, more recently, Toni Bowers, Susan Greenfield, Claudia Johnson and Barbara Charlesworth Gelphi have shown how, in the late eighteenth century, motherhood ceased to be exclusively defined by the physiological processes of childbearing and became a social and emotional undertaking with a defining moral content.¹ In fiction, advice literature, sermons and journalism if not in daily practice, becoming a mother depended on breastfeeding one’s children rather than sending them to wetnurses, taking responsibility for the more interesting parts of day-to-day childcare, and making it one’s defining business to pass on the feminine virtues of piety, charity and...

Maria Edgeworth’s interest in the politics of production and consumption is widely acknowledged, particularly in the context of her Anglo-Irish identity and colonial fictions. Catherine Gallagher notes inNobody’s Storythat, ‘This belief in the free market’s ability to stimulate efficient production and hence promote the general good is fundamental to Edgeworth’s works.’¹ Gallagher goes on to show how Edgeworth’s fear of her own excessive literary productivity shapes her understanding of the literary marketplace and the relationship between profitability and moral value in women’s writing. Julie Kipp offers a detailed analysis of wet-nursing and colonial discourses of production and consumption...

Ferrier develops the relationship between maternity, feeding and the body politic established in earlier women’s fiction in the context of early nineteenth century Scottishness. Declining to associate subjugated women with the subjugated nation, Ferrier argues instead for colonialism as the basis of female liberation, depicting the replacement of Scottish with British rule as the replacement of the stifling father for the (unusually generous) step-mother. Ferrier’s work is explicitly anti-Romantic, anticipating in several ways Katie Trumpener’s critique of Celtic Romanticism, and unusually opposed to the logic of the fairy tale. The step-mother’s regime in these novels is both benevolent and wise,...

As I make what I fondly imagine (again) to be final revisions toSpilling the Beans, one of the things that distract me from scholarly productivity is the consumption of on-line newspapers. And one of today’s headlines, under an investigation into the ‘exploitation of migrant workers picking vegetables for supermarkets’, beside ‘Fatal e-coli case probe continues’ and an advertisement for a job as a dietician specialising in obesity prevention, is ‘Eating for two puts unborn child at risk of junk addiction’. I resist, for now, the compulsion to click ‘more on food issues’, and learn that ‘pregnant and breastfeeding rats’...