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Rights and Right Conduct in Amelia Opie's ADELINE MOWBRAY

One of the enduring and collateral legacies of the ideological debates in Britain surrounding the French Revolution is a tendency to ascribe to conservative texts motives having more to do with either unthinking devotion to an imagined past or, in the case of women writers, professional selfpreservation than the earnest articulation of intellectual political ideas. Yet Amelia Alderson Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) resists the classification of such texts as reflexively loyalist, as the author’s honest interrogation of English legal and social norms solidifies the reformist vision within those institutions from which they derive. Opie, by way of narrative commentary and the didactic depiction of her heroine’s flawed education, promotes her own unique methodology of natural rights, grounded in both theoretical inquiry and the corresponding laws of custom and experience. The encounter between the theoretical nature of the Enlightenment and its opposition in Adeline Mowbray is personified by generational dissonance, as the philosophical ideals of the mother are enacted by the daughter as infallible moral and ethical standards of conduct. The beginning of the novel situates a young Adeline principally under the tutelage of her widowed mother, an enthusiastic proponent of the “abstruse systems of morals and metaphysics, or new theories in politics,” on which constant speculation has caused a “neglect of positive duties” (Opie 4). That deficiency, readers are told, has grave consequences, “[laying], perhaps, the foundation to herself and her mother of future misery and disgrace” (15). The distinction, though, between Editha’s and Adeline’s espousal of an ostensibly salutary