SOURCE: "Lady Delacour's Library: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Fashionable Reading," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 4, March, 1994, pp. 423-39.

[In the following discussion of Belinda, MacFadyen examines Edgeworth's depiction of the disruptive potential of adherence to fashion to a well-regulated domestic life.]

In recent years literary scholars such as Mary Poovey and Nancy Armstrong have outlined the doctrines of feminine propriety and have highlighted the cultural importance of a domestic definition of femininity. The proper lady and the domestic woman are marked by their ability to regulate their own desires and the desires of other members of their circles. Such women privilege self-control over self-indulgence, the contained over the unbounded, order over chaos. Poovey and Armstrong, however, have also noted that this idealized notion of feminine goodness is persistently confronted with alternate interpretations of feminine identity. While sexual desire is the most common source of uneasiness, women's failure to regulate the economies of their households also troubles the proponents of domestic ideology. The affluence displayed on a woman's body or in her actions could be read both as a sign of her husband's status and as a sign of economic and sexual corruption. Not surprisingly, the proponents of domestic ideology viewed fashionable display with ambivalence, for such self-display made social status visible while depleting the economic basis of that status. The fashionable woman, like the aristocratic woman with whom she is associated, thus becomes a threat to domesticity.

Throughout her career Maria Edgeworth addressed the threat posed to domesticity by fashionability. Her most extended exploration of this topic appears in the eight works that make up the Tales of Fashionable Life, but the issue underlies most of her work and is crucial to one of her best-known novels, Belinda (1801). Readers have frequently found the eponymous heroine of the novel to be a tiresome distraction from the more appealing and irrepressibly witty woman of fashion, Lady Delacour. The reviewer for the Monthly Review, for instance, complained that Belinda "usurped the superior right of Lady Delacour to give the title to the work: for it is to the character and agency of the latter . . . that the tale owes its principle attractions." While the novel champions domesticity in its accounts of the courtships of Belinda Portman and Virginia St. Pierre, its primary goal is the transformation of the scintillating Lady Delacour from a fashionable woman into a domestic woman.

The disruptive potential of fashionability is clearly evident in Edgeworth's portrayal of the Delacour household. Lady Delacour's account of her unhappy marriage and dissipated life reveals that neither of the Delacours has a firm grasp of domestic economy. Both reject the self-regulation integral to domestic gender identities and enter "the fashionable world with a mutual desire to be as extravagant as possible." The consequent financial irregularities are accompanied by sexual irregularities as both Lady Delacour and Lord Delacour indulge themselves in successively more damaging incidents of financial and moral dissipation. Edgeworth uses a series of overlapping analogies of mind, body, and domestic sphere to represent these disruptions. Lady Delacour's diseased breast, for example, metonymically represents her diseased mind and her refusal to accept that legitimate femininity is defined by its domesticity and its ability to regulate a domestic circle. What gives the portrait of Lady Delacour's domestic failure its characteristically Edgeworthian accent is the prominence assigned to textual matters. Edgeworth supplements the familiar signs of domestic inadequacy—profligate spending, maternal inadequacy, and dubious sexual behavior—with a striking emphasis upon literary transgression. Indeed, Lady Delacour's fashionable success is dependent on her ability to use her literary skill to support her fashionable status.

The ability to assume a constantly shifting series of identities is the key to Lady Delacour's success in eliciting the publicity essential to her status as a fashionable woman, and she is therefore consistently characterized as an actress. While the novel is permeated with a theatrical motif, from the masquerade that opens it to the epilogue that marks its closure, Lady Delacour supplements her obvious theatricality with frequent and ostentatious references to literary texts. A rough tally of the rates of allusion and quotation by the characters and the narrator of Belinda reveals that Lady Delacour outquotes them all, alluding to literary texts eight times more frequently. This concentration of literary allusion is not simply a function of Lady Delacour's dominance of the plot. Her deliberate proliferation of literary references through quotation, parody, and allusion is her most distinctive form of selfdisplay. In Lady Delacour's efforts to maintain her social prominence through a display of her literary skills, Edgeworth develops a trope of fashionable reading.

The fashionable reader misuses her literary knowledge and skill to support a rapidly altering sequence of personas whose novelty and daring enable her to maintain her public preeminence. The fashionable reader shares a number of characteristics with her more common counterpart, the female reader. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries novel reading was persistently and negatively associated with women, and women's literary pleasure was generally regarded as a form of illicit sexual excitement. This widespread view generated a trope of female reading that asserts that women's reading is an act of the body, not the mind. Thus women's responses to literature are frequently represented as forms of gluttony, intoxication, or sexual arousal. Edgeworth frequently draws on the trope of female reading, but over the course of her canon she develops two alternate ways of viewing women's reading: the equally troubling trope of fashionable reading associated with Lady Delacour and the corrective trope of domestic reading associated with Belinda.

While Lady Delacour, a fashionable reader, uses texts to provide her with a series of nondomestic identities, the more orderly and more retiring Belinda, a domestic reader, uses her knowledge of literary matters to regulate her own desires and ultimately to regulate the desires of Lady Delacour. Because of the adept maneuvering of Mrs. Stanhope, her socially ambitious aunt, Belinda has been welcomed into Lady Delacour's household, where she encounters various challenges to her integrity. Belinda's ability to judge rightly is tested by the fascinating Lady Delacour and the intoxicating world she represents. Belinda's ability to resist Lady Delacour's temptations owes nothing to her aunt's instruction in "the art of rising in the world." Before Belinda became a ward of Mrs. Stanhope, she "had been educated chiefly in the country; she had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity." This indistinctly sketched domestic background has made her unfit for the metropolitan life of fashion. Although Belinda's "taste for literature" initially declines "in proportion to her intercourse with the fashionable world," she rapidly regains her taste for reading when she discovers the duplicity of that world at the masquerade that initiates much of the action of the novel. After inadvertently hearing Clarence Hervey briskly compare her to Packwood's ubiquitously advertised razor strops, Belinda leaves behind the world of routs, drums, and masquerades and retreats into a world of domestic reading. Belinda, in effect, refuses to acquiesce in her aunt's wish that she present herself as a commodity on the marriage market. She resists the indiscriminate circulation that is integral to the fashionable world and chooses instead to spend increasing amounts of time in Lady Delacour's library. While Belinda moves into the library, away from the sites of fashionable display, she does not closet herself in the secret space of self-indulgent reading. Instead of the romances and novels typically condemned by the trope of female reading, Belinda reads nonfiction by Adam Smith, Jean De La Bruyère, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and John Aiken. When she does read fiction she picks up the blameless moral tales of Jean-François Marmontel and John Moore, writers to whom Edgeworth herself has often been compared. Such texts do not lend themselves to female reading. Belinda's ability to resist both the temptations of female reading and the charms of the fashionable world ultimately enables her to reform Lady Delacour, for domestic reading acts as a counter to the world of fashion and the flux that is its fundamental characteristic.

Both the trope of fashionable reading and the trope of female reading present women's reading as a breach of domestic femininity, and both represent the relationship of the female body to textuality as problematic. The trope of female reading emphasizes the secretive eroticism of the passive female reader. Female reading offers its practitioners an illicit and solitary sexual pleasure that leaves them vulnerable to seduction. The trope of female reading is represented in Belinda by Virginia St. Pierre, whose unsupervised novel reading overstimulates her adolescent sexual yearnings, creating the nightmares that torment her. Her novel reading produces a confused and confusing sexual arousal, but her disorder is largely a private matter. Virginia's story makes the case for the primacy of the domestic sphere by demonstrating the effect of excessive isolation upon Virginia's sexual imagination, while the story of Lady Delacour makes a similar case by exploring the effect of excessive publicity on Lady Delacour's body and family.

The trope of fashionable reading retains the problematic female body, but its emphasis falls upon the active public display of the female body. Edgeworth does link Lady Delacour's fashionable reading to a disruption in the libidinal economy of her marriage, but she insists that fashionable reading is not primarily an agent of sexual arousal. While female reading brings women lovers (whether real or imagined), fashionable reading brings them admirers. The female reader entertains lovers in a secret, erotic space, but the fashionable reader commands center stage, displaying her literary skill to ensure the publicity upon which her status within a system of fashionability rests. Thus, although Lady Delacour's flirtation with Clarence Hervey (a flirtation that relies heavily upon the manipulation of literary texts) is perceived by her husband as a sexual threat, it is not in essence erotic. Clarence is Lady Delacour's admirer, not her lover.

Edgeworth's trope of fashionable reading is associated, nevertheless, with a disruption of the sexual economy. The displayed female body is a visible denial of domestic ideology, and much of Lady Delacour's fashionable reading is calculated to display either her own body or Belinda's. Lady Delacour's textual practices tend to draw Belinda into excessively public (though generally indirect) expressions of sexuality. The fashionable reader's insistence upon publicizing others at the same moment that she draws attention to herself is the foundation of many of the conflicts between Lady Delacour and Belinda during the first half of the novel. Lady Delacour's literary allusions, especially when used to characterize Belinda, are encoded expressions of the sexual ethic of the fashionable world, in which courtship is negotiated through publicity and in which marriage is primarily a financial arrangement. Fashionable adepts such as Lady Delacour and Mrs. Stanhope understand that publicity is an essential aspect of fashionable marriage, whether one is advertising an heiress or a less financially well-endowed woman.

Belinda, however, repudiates the display inherent in fashionable courtship and resists her aunt's and her chaperone's attempts to advertise her charms. Belinda's resistance to Lady Delacour's use of literary reference to encourage Clarence in his fitful courtship is evident in the episode that follows Belinda's refusal to be at home to him during one of Lady Delacour's absences. When Lady Delacour returns from her visit to the royal drawing room she finds Clarence languishing on her stoop. Upon learning that Belinda has refused to see him, Lady Delacour reassures him, insisting that "not at home is nonsense, you know." She then takes Clarence to Belinda's sanctuary, the library, crying as she goes, "Shine out, appear, be found, my lovely Zara!" The allusion to Voltaire's Zaire (1732) underlines Lady Delacour's insistence that Belinda be visible to Clarence and that she engage in the self-display essential to the fashionable world. Lady Delacour goes further in her attempt to publicize Belinda by proffering another literary allusion. Finding Belinda in the library, Lady Delacour remarks: "Here she is—what doing I know not—studying Hervey's Meditations on the Tombs, I should guess, by the sanctification of her looks." Lady Delacour ironically conveys her hidden preoccupation with death through this reference to James Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs (1746-47). More important, she uses the reference to suggest that Belinda is at some level interested in the scene's other Hervey.

This intersection of forced publicity, literary text, and courtship is repeated during the same visit when Lady Delacour attempts to enact "a second rape of the lock." In response to Lady Delacour's mimicry of the awkward movement of women in hoop skirts, Clarence declares that he can "manage a hoop as well as any woman in England." Clarence dons the appropriate clothing and plays Madame de Pomenars quite convincingly until Lady Delacour pulls the comb out of Belinda's hair and drops it on the floor. Clarence, befuddled by "the sight of the finest hair that he had ever beheld," bends to pick up the comb, "totally forgetting his hoop and his character." As a reward for his good-natured acceptance of the lost bet, Lady Delacour offers him a lock of Belinda's distracting hair.

Belinda, however, escapes the force of the allusion and its illegitimate advertisement of her sexual availability. Her response to Lady Delacour's display is a corresponding and resisting retreat. Belinda retires as soon as she can, but the "modest, graceful dignity" of her manners guarantees that she escapes "without even the charge of prudery."

Although Lady Delacour ostensibly uses literary references to promote a flirtation between Clarance and Belinda, the performances also call attention to Lady Delacour herself, setting up an uncomfortable triangular relationship. This triangle is most forcefully expressed in the sequence in which Lady Delacour appears dressed as Queen Elizabeth and Clarence casts himself as the Earl of Essex. The narrator announces that "both the actor and actress were highly animated, and seemed so fully possessed by their parts as to be insensible" to the implication of the scene they are playing out. The "deep blush" that appears on "Belinda's cheek, when Queen Elizabeth addressed her as one of her maids of honour, of whom she affected to be jealous," abruptly makes Clarence aware of the subtext of this masquerade. This charade is doubly revealing. Dr. X—, a rational physician, is able to read through Lady Delacour's disguise, for it paradoxically reveals the disease it is designed to hide. Dr. X—observes to Clarence and Belinda that Lady Delacour's feverish "gaiety" is not the sign of "a sound mind in a sound body." Further and more telling is the betraying ruff. The shadow cast by the ruff of Lady Delacour's costume trembles and reveals her hectic pulse to the discerning eye of Dr. X—, who chooses this moment to admonish Clarence about the frivolity of a life devoted to "the evanescent amusement of a drawing-room." He urges Clarence to strive to "be permanently useful to his fellow-creatures." This encouragement breaks the triangular flirtation, and Clarence begins to reform. He well knows that Lady Delacour is not in love with him, that "her only wish was to obtain his admiration." To encourage her reformation, therefore, he resolves to withdraw his admiration and "to show her that it could no longer be secured without deserving his esteem."

Clarence's assurance that he can correct Lady Delacour's flaws is somewhat impertinent, but his recognition that Lady Delacour needs a friend rather than an admirer is crucial to Edgeworth's point: the health of Lady Delacour's person and of her household requires that she replace her admirers with friends. Friendship, however, is the product of domestic not fashionable reading, and the course of Lady Delacour's recovery is dependent on her ability to perceive the difference between admiration and friendship. Thus the willingness of her former admirers to exchange fashionable reading for domestic reading is essential to her cure. Belinda Portman is the central figure in this process, and she gradually draws Lady Delacour away from self-display and toward the domestic literary practices exemplified in the Percival family. Belinda, in effect, must act as a "cordial," gradually healing Lady Delacour and her household.

Belinda's task is to unlock Lady Delacour's secrets, essentially the secret of her denied affection for her daughter, Helena, and for her husband. Belinda transforms the Delacour household by arranging the return of Helena, and with Helena comes an altered relationship to literary texts and to the question of self-display. Shortly after Clarence resolves to be Lady Delacour's friend rather than her admirer, Lady Delacour asks Belinda to "look over" some of the unread letters that have accumulated on her desk. Lady Delacour is surprised by Belinda's reaction to one of the letters. From Belinda's "countenance" she guesses that the letter must contain "something wondrous pathetic." When she learns that it is from Helena she dismisses the letter, telling Belinda to "read it to yourself, my dear—a school-girl's letter is a thing I abominate—I make it a rule never to read Helena's epistles." Belinda, however, possesses formidable "powers of persuasion," and she quickly convinces the seemingly indifferent mother to read her daughter's letters. Lady Delacour is pleased to discover that her daughter writes well, but she is less pleased by Helena's obvious affection for Lady Anne Percival. As Lady Delacour reveals her jealousy of Lady Anne, she also reveals that she has read this letter and previous letters with some care. Ultimately, it is less the content of Helena's letters that is important than the act of reading them, for in reading Lady Delacour enacts the maternal and domestic identity that is essential to proper femininity in Edgeworth's works.

When Helena enters her mother's house she brings with her the invisible but formidable influence of the exemplary Percival family. The Percivals themselves never enter the Delacour home, but Lady Anne and Henry Percival are indirectly responsible for its reform in that their family embodies the domestic literary practices essential to Lady Delacour's cure. As both Belinda and Clarence discover, no one person dominates the conversation in the Percival home. The entire family, including the children, participates in discussions. Furthermore, conversational skills are not used to display the individual's brilliance; rather, they are used to encourage the talents of others. The competition and the deceptive theatricality that mark the fashionable world of Lady Delacour are utterly absent.

The reunion of Lady Delacour and her daughter takes place in the privacy of the Delacour library during the half hour preceding a fashionable reading party, and the Sortes Virgilianae sequence that follows the reading party is animated by the Percival influence. After the reading of Voltaire's L'Ecossaise (1760) Lady Delacour, Belinda, Helena, and Clarence idle away the time before the meal looking at the miscellaneous collection of books on the drawing-room table. Clarence takes up one of them, crying "Come, let us try our fate by the Sortes Virgiliana?." Lady Delacour, always eager for any game of chance, opens at random the proffered volume of Marmontel's tales. The book opens to "a description of the manner in which la femme comme il y en a peu managed a husband, who was excessively afraid of being thought to be governed by his wife." Lady Delacour can scarcely avoid the coincidence between the text and her own marital situation. When she finds Belinda's bookmark between the following pages, Lady Delacour assumes that Belinda and Clarence have contrived the Sortes to provide her a less than subtle lesson.

Lady Delacour's fortuitous reading of Marmontel has indeed been contrived, but not in the obvious manner she supposes. Nor is she correct in her conjecture that Belinda's marker is a sign that she has been studying Marmontel in anticipation of becoming the second Lady Delacour. This moment of reading is contrived by Edgeworth as a means of embedding the Percival family model of maternal conduct in the heart of Lady Delacour's diseased household. The conjunction of Lady Delacour and "la femme comme il y en a peu" was first made by Lady Anne, during a dinner party earlier in the novel. On that occasion Lady Anne refuted an assertion that Lady Delacour was monstrous in her neglect of Helena by invoking both the rational principles of Marmontel and the more fanciful notion of enchantment. Lady Delacour's "enchantment will soon be at an end," she assured the company, "and she will return to her natural character. I should not be at all surprised, if Lady Delacour were to appear at once la femme comme il y en a peu." Thus the Sortes Virgilianæ gains its predictive power not from Lady Delacour's random selection of a passage but from its deliberate association with Lady Anne's rational domesticity. Lady Anne's indirect influence is augmented by the bookmark, which is a sign of Belinda's domestic reading, a reading marked by an absence of randomness as well as by its propriety.

The conversation that follows the Sortes Virgiliana is dominated by Clarence's obvious efforts to persuade Lady Delacour to adopt a more appropriate maternal identity. He openly expresses his "admiration" of a fashionable duchess who had "stopped short in the career of dissipation to employ her inimitable talents in the education of her children; who had absolutely brought virtue into fashion by the irresistible powers of wit and beauty." While Lady Delacour dismisses his enthusiasm, advising him to "write a sentimental comedy, a comédie larmoyante, or a drama on the German model, and call it The School for Mothers," she is moved to express a bitter regret that it is too late for her to become the heroine of such a text. And indeed, until Lady Delacour is willing to reveal her secrets to the eye of her husband, she has no hope of reform.

Belinda, however, gradually persuades Lady Delacour to do just that. After Lady Delacour has been convinced that Belinda is not preparing to usurp her place in her husband's or her daughter's affections, she agrees to expose her breast to her husband and to Dr. X—. Each of these physical revelations is accompanied by a textual revelation, one also encouraged by Belinda. Soon after she bares her diseased breast to her husband and tells him the secret that has driven her onto the fashionable stage, Lady Delacour also opens her secret library to him. This secret library contains Clarence Hervey's letters, which she teasingly tells Belinda are "calculated to make you fall in love with the writer of them." Lord Delacour's almost-conquered jealousy of Clarence returns when he sees Lady Delacour opening Clarence's letters "one after another, looking over them without seeming well to know what she was about" and hears her ask Belinda to put the letters in a "cabinet of curiosities" with a "secret lock" that Lady Delacour "alone can manage." In an aside, Belinda entreats her to open the secret of the letters to Lord Delacour, suggesting that he is not jealous of Lady Delacour's "person"—her body or her heart—but of her mind. Domestic harmony can be restored only when this final lock has been opened and this final secret told. By being opened up to the nominal supervision of a husband, Clarence's letters cease to belong to the world of fashion and enter into domestic circulation. Lady Delacour's demonstration of "confidence," "kindness," and "condescension" in this matter fixes Lord Delacour at home.

The transformation of Lady Delacour's fashionable household into an Edgeworthian domestic salon, however, requires that one final secret library be opened. As the time for her mastectomy approaches, Lady Delacour engages in a secret reading that recalls the solitary self-indulgence of the female reader. She takes to reading religious texts, and she is as ashamed of them as other heroines are of lewd novels. These "methodistical" books are "highly oratorical" and generally "of a mystical cast" to Belinda, who happens upon them by chance, they are "scarcely intelligible." When Lady Delacour learns that Belinda has been examining them, she orders that the books "be locked up in my own bookcase" and the key returned to her.

Operating outside rational discourse and sociable domestic space, Lady Delacour's religious reading is linked to the motifs of disease and morbidity. Her religious mania comes upon her "by fits," generally when the effect of the opium is weakening and her mind is overwhelmed by "the most dreadful superstitious terrors—terrors the more powerful as they were secret." Secret and fearful, Lady Delacour's religious reading makes her vulnerable to manipulation and itself produces wrong interpretations, most clearly in the episode of Harriot Freke's final foray. Misled by gossip, Harriot believes that Lady Delacour has taken a lover. In an attempt to discover his identity and to frighten Lady Delacour, she dresses herself as a ghost and climbs over the garden wall. Confused by her reading, Lady Delacour readily believes that the vision she sees on three successive nights is a forerunner of her own death. Once she confesses this vision to Belinda and to Dr. X—, they are able to unmask Harriot and to expel her once and for all from Lady Delacour's life. The following morning Dr. X—determines that Lady Delacour's breast is not cancerous, and he points out that if she had "permitted either the surgeon or him to have examined sooner into the real state of the case, it would have saved herself infinite pain, and them all anxiety."

The third and final element of Lady Delacour's cure also underlines the importance of texts. Relieved of her fear for her health, Lady Delacour turns her attention to her family's library, complaining to Belinda that the books in the library are "in dreadful confusion." She notes that Lord Delacour "has really a very fine library," but instead of such a profusion of books she would prefer a more orderly collection: "I wish he had half as many books twice as well arranged: I never can find any thing I want." She turns from Belinda to Dr. X—, asking him to "recommend a librarian to my lord—not a chaplain, observe." Lady Delacour's interest in restoring order to the library is an implicit assumption of her role as the domestic superintendent of her husband's resources.

The novel's emphasis on the regulatory capacity of books might lead one to expect that Dr. X—will indeed provide a librarian, but instead he introduces a figure more suited to remove the residual effects of Lady Delacour's feverish descent into the obsessive reading of religious texts. The introduction of this figure, the chaplain Moreton, is framed by a literary text. Dr. X—begins by quoting the famous description of the Parson in Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1387). Chaucer's model, he goes on to claim, is fully present in a contemporary minister, Mr. Moreton. Moreton himself then enters the story to complete Lady Delacour's cure, relieving her from "the terrors of methodism" and replacing them with "the consolations of mild and rational piety." With the elimination of Lady Delacour's secret remorse her transformation from fashionable reader to domestic reader is complete:

She was no longer in continual anxiety to conceal the state of her health from the world. She had no secret to keep—no part to act; her reconciliation with her husband and with his friends restored her mind to ease and self-complacency. Her little Helena was a source of daily pleasure; and no longer conscious of neglecting her daughter, she no longer feared that the affections of her child should be alienated.

Lady Anne's prophecy has been fulfilled.

The effectiveness of Lady Delacour's adoption of domestic reading strategies is evident in the conclusion of the novel. Her manipulation of the sequence of events that closes the novel—the confrontation of Clarence and Virginia, the reunion of Virginia and her father, and the acceptance of Clarence as Belinda's suitor—is the occasion for one of Lady Delacour's most theatrical performances. This performance, however, is crucially differentiated from her earlier theatricals by its domestic intent. Following a brief debate about the proper way of ending the story of a female reader's confusion, a domestic reader's courtship, and a fashionable reader's reformation, Lady Delacour announces that she can "conclude the business in two lines." She closes the novel by placing her players "in proper attitudes for stage effect. What signifies being happy, unless we appear so?" She asks Captain Sunderland to kneel with Virginia "at her father's feet" and tells Mr. Hartley that he is "in the act of giving them your blessing." She assembles a second domestic tableau by informing Clarence that he has "a right to Belinda's hand" and that he "may kiss it too," for "it is the rule of the stage." When Lord Delacour enters with Helena, Lady Delacour turns to her own domestic circle, praising her husband's "good start of surprise" and instructing him to "stand still, pray; you cannot be better than you are: Helena, my love, do not let go your father's hand." Pleased with the three domestic tableaux, Lady Delacour "comes forward to address the audience with a moral—a moral! Yes, 'Our tale contains a moral; and, no doubt,/You all have wit enough to find it out.'" The legitimacy of this literary display is guaranteed by Lady Delacour's domestic purpose. The theatrical tableaux she creates are not designed to display her person, but rather to display the harmony made possible by domesticity. The future happiness of Virginia, Belinda, and Lady Delacour is affirmed by their membership within these completed domestic circles.

The ability of Lady Delacour to use a previously disruptive theatricality to highlight the importance of domestic order has a secondary function. Just as the trope of female reading enables Edgeworth to confront the problems associated with women's literary consumption, her trope of fashionable reading enables her to explore the problems associated with women's literary production. Lady Delacour's nondomestic theatricality and her misuse of her literary skill articulate the improprieties implicit in a woman's assertion of public literary authority. Though transformed into a domestic reader, Lady Delacour has not lost her literary verve. As she herself says, she has been "won, not tamed!—A tame Lady Delacour would be a sorry animal, not worth looking at." By reforming Lady Delacour rather than silencing her, Edgeworth implies that a woman's literary skill can coincide with domestic propriety. Edgeworth's first portrait of a reformed fashionable reader thus suggests that a woman may possess both domestic and literary authority.