Translation plays a significant role in Chapter Ten, which maps out women writers’ contributions to a transnational European culture, focussing on British and French fiction. Although not exclusive to the Romantic period, connections between literary women were particularly productive. If Staël served as an important model, other influential women whose lives and works complicate notions of a distinct national literature also contributed to an international Romantic culture, including Brun, Genlis, Charrière, and Krudener. Popular genres that engaged with the foreign in the 1790s included émigré novels and travel writing. Women also participated in the public sphere through the unfairly trivialised salon culture. After reviewing a number of salons, including those of Albrizzi, von Kurland, Varnhagen, Moira, and the Hollands, the chapter then explores female contributions to education theory, including Madame de Genlis’s British legacy; women’s place in the novel market, contextualising Austen by placing her side by side with two little known novelists, Mary Charlton and Elizabeth Meeke; female translations as important forms of cultural mediation, particularly those of Isabel de Montolieu; and, finally, female-edited or -authored periodicals, concluding with Sarah Harriet Burney and her possible translation of Feijoo’s defence of women.

The cultures of sensibility explored in Chapter Four authorised women to write, but as the chapter shows, the concept was equally influential among male writers, and contributed in significant ways to Romantic-period aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Eighteenth-century aesthetics reflected a new interest in the body and the senses. Like Romantic nature, Romantic sensibility is presented as a story of co-becoming, in this case between body and mind rather than between mind and nature. After discussing the difficulty of defining sensibility, the chapter provides a history of eighteenth-century neurophysiology, including the ground-breaking work of Haller, the electrical experiments of Galvani, and Bonnet’s invention of psychology. Steiner then turns to Rousseau to demonstrate the transition from medical to moral sensibility, and how sympathy operated as a central principle among Edinburgh’s moral sense philosophers. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey helped spread moral sympathy across Europe, linking it with the feminisation of culture and with various reform movements, as shown in examples ranging from Chateaubriand to Jean Paul, a Danish anti-slavery narrative to the ‘Revolution debate’ in Britain. The chapter ends on an ambivalent note, using the Pygmalion motif to address the often-criticised connection between sensibility and narcissism.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon is a pivotal figure in the dissemination of Byron and Byronic influence from the mid-1820s to the 1840s. This chapter details local encounters between the two poets during this period, before opening up further avenues for investigating the Byronic inheritance among nineteenth-century women poets.