30:

• "In place of the mirror and the lamp, we might think of Romantic women literary critics as sustaining an earlier Enlightenment image of literature popularized by Addison and Cowper, the image of literature as a balance or scale that weighs equally the demands of the head and the heart" (30).
• "In their writings this balance or scale is always held . . . by a woman" (30).

• "Romantic women writers, whether conservative or radical, celebrated not the achievements of genius nor the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but rather the workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated—in a gesture of revolutionary social implications—in the female as well as the male body" (31).
• "Romantic women writers represent a subjectivity constructed in relation to other subjectivities, hence a self that is fluid, absorptive, responsive, with permeable ego boundaries" (31).
• "In their writings, this self typically locates its identity in its connections with a larger human group [not unlike WW?], whether the family or a social community" (31).

• "While they shared an Enlightenment commitment to rationality, they added to it the revolutionary claim that the female mind was not only as rational as the male but perhaps even  more rational" (32).
• "In this feminine Romanticism ideology, moral reform both of the individual and of the family politic is achieved, then, not by utopian imaginative vision but by the communal exercise of reason, moderation, tolerance, and the domestic affections that can embrace even the alien other, even Frankenstein's monster" (32).

• They suggested "that those cultural values historically associated with women were superior to those associated with men.  They argued that the values of domesticity—the private virtues of sympathy, tolerance, generosity, affection, and a commitment to an ethic of care—should become the guiding program for all public or civic action" (33).

• "Since women were denied access to the institutions of academic learning in England and were typically taught only the 'accomplishments' of a well-bred young lady (dancing, singing, sketching, needle-work, a smattering of French and Italian, a little arithmetic and—most important—how to read and write), the women critics of the Romantic period recognized that literature—the reading of a good book—was essential to the rational education of young girls" (34).

• "They developed a new image of the ideal female as one who is rational and socially responsible, one who takes the lead in governing both herself and her children" (36).

• "Romantic women literary critics used their writings not only to advocate new roles and more egalitarian marriages for women but also to condemn the abuses of patriarchy and the traditional construction of masculinity" (37).

• "They explicitly defend a mimetic theory of art against the inclinations of the male Romantic poets to invoke visionary experiences or supernatural events in medieval or exotic settings" (38).

• "These women critics consistently argued that sensibility must be joined with correct perception, that literature must record not flights of fancy or escapist desire but empirical truth" (39).

• "Not only was the novel capable of depicting a world that was both more probable and more psychologically acute than that found in epic | poetry or the earlier romances, it was also more democratic" (43-44).

• "Writing a criticism of their own, poised midway between a neoclassical mimetic aesthetic, on the one hand, . . . and, on the other hand, a masculine Romantic aesthetic devoted to celebrating the originality and passionate feeling of the poet, Romantic women literary critics offered a third aesthetic.  They insisted that the cultural role of literature is to educate even more than to delight, to educate by teaching readers to take delight in the triumph of moral benevolence, sexual self-control, and rational intelligence" (45).

• "Not the poet but the novelist, and a female novelist at that, here becomes the unacknowledged legislator of the world" (47).

• "In claiming the novel as their own, Romantic women critics also laid claim to a revolution in both female manners and cultural authority" (48).