Opie, Amelia (1769–1853)

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Opie, Amelia (1769–1853)

English writer. Born Amelia Alderson on November 12, 1769, in Norwich, England; died on December 2, 1853, in Norwich; daughter of James Alderson (a physician) and Amelia (Briggs) Alderson; married John Opie (a painter), on May 8, 1798 (died 1807); no children.

Selected works:

Dangers of Coquetry (1790); The Father and Daughter (1801); Poems (1802); Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1805); Simple Tales (1806); Temper (1812); Tales of Real Life (1813); Valentine's Eve (1816); New Tales (1818); Tales of the Heart (1820); Madeline (1822); Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches (1825); The Black Man's Lament; or, How to Make Sugar (1826); Detraction Displayed (1828); Lays for the Dead (1834).

While she is now little known, Amelia Opie was a popular and prolific writer in the first quarter of the 19th century, and numbered among her friends and acquaintances some of the major figures of her day. An only child whose informal education consisted mostly of learning to dance, play music, and speak French, she was taught early about the horrors of slavery (of which she would later write) by her mother, who died when Opie was 15. Opie then assumed charge of her father's household in her hometown of Norwich and entered society life. She was well liked in local society and received a similar reception on a trip to London in 1794, where she mixed with progressive intellectuals including politician John Horne Tooke, the painter Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft . She also met artist John Opie, whom she married on May 8, 1798.

Opie had published her first novel, The Dangers of Coquetry, anonymously in 1790, and her new husband urged her to pursue her writing further—mostly to prevent her from attending the parties he himself disliked. In 1801, she established her reputation as a writer with The Father and Daughter, which achieved significant popularity despite some critics' disparagement of its static characterization and tired seduction plot. The story of a father driven insane by his daughter's flight into the arms of a libertine, and their subsequent reconciliation, The Father and Daughter eventually went through ten editions and supposedly caused Walter Scott to cry. She released a volume of poetry, titled simply Poems, the following year, and in 1805 published the immensely successful Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter. Opie got the idea for her story from incidents in the life of her friend Wollstonecraft, who while unmarried had had a daughter (Mary Shelley ) with her lover Gilbert Imlay, and died in 1797 of complications of childbirth shortly after her marriage to William Godwin. While the novel presents Adeline Mowbray and her unconventional beliefs sympathetically, later critics have noted that her death at the end of the novel serves to reinforce justification for society's rigid conventions.

Opie's next book, a collection of short stories entitled Simple Tales, received less-than-favorable reviews upon its release in 1806, with critics complaining of conventional plots and unoriginal characters. After her husband's death the following year, she returned to Norwich, where she lived with her sickly father while maintaining her friendships with important literary and artistic figures; among these were Germaine de Staël , William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald , Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Sarah Siddons . She also wrote some of what is considered her best work, including her second collection of short stories, Tales of Real Life (1813). Opie began to show an increasing interest in Quakerism from 1814, and it is from about this point that critics trace a general decline in the quality of her work, including the short-story collections New Tales (1818) and Tales of the Heart (1820), although her final novel, Madeline (1822), still receives generally good notices.

In 1825, Opie formally joined the Society of Friends, and gave up writing fiction as contrary to her religious views. (She still mingled in society, however, and contrived to wear her Quaker gray clothes fashionably.) She abandoned the completion of a novel for which she had already received a publishing contract, and focused her energies on philanthropy and on morally uplifting or instructive tracts. These included Illustrations of Lying, in All Its Branches (1825) and Detraction Displayed (1828), as well as pamphlets and essays decrying the evils of slavery. British critics found these works too moralistic to be palatable, although Illustrations reportedly enjoyed some success in America. Somewhat of a puzzle among her friends and reading public, an established writer who had chosen to end her career apparently in mid-stream, Opie remained active and healthy until only a few months before the end of her long life, and was working on her memoirs at the time of her death in Norwich in 1853. A street in her hometown is named in her honor.

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Howard, Susan K. "Amelia Opie" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 116: British Romantic Novelists, 1789–1832. Edited by Bradford K. Mudge. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1936.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Simmons, James R. "Amelia Opie" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 159: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1800–1880. Edited by John R. Greenfield. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996.

Jacqueline Mitchell , freelance writer, Detroit, Michigan