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Although a conversion to Quakerism in the 1820s curbed her writing career, Amelia Alderson Opie ( 1769-1853) was throughout her life celebrated as an author of poetry and of numerous popular "tales" ranging in length from a few pages to multiple volumes.' The daughter of James Alderson, an eminent Norwich physician and practicing Unitarian, Opie was long and famously active in artistic and intellectual circles of Norwich and London, especially those circles associated toward the end of the eighteenth century with rational Dissent. Thanks to her connections to Dissent, in general, but especially to the Society of Friends (her closest attachment was to the Gurneys, a large and wealthy Quaker family in Norwich), she became passionately involved in reform movements, notably the antislavery movement and prison and asylum reform.
In a curious episode of Opie's 1805 three-volume novel of unconventional domestic life, Adeline Mowbray; or, the Mother and Daughter, the young heroine's dying lover, a radical philosopher named Frederic Glenmurray, develops an obsessive desire to eat an entire pineapple and refuses to be subdued by Adeline's offer of a mere bunch of grapes. Since Adeline is determined, despite a financial crisis, "to procure Glenmurray every thing that his capricious appetite required,"2 she gathers together her small savings and ventures to market to purchase the expensive fruit. During her journey, Adeline chances upon a scene in which a distressed woman, described by the narrator as "mulatto," is attempting unsuccessfully to protect her impoverished husband, who is being taken to debtor's prison. Their "mulatto" son, known as "the Tawny Boy," stands by weeping. After some deliberation, Adeline discharges the debts with the money she had intended for the purchase of the pineapple and returns home empty-handed to the disappointed Glenmurray. Later, the mixed-race woman, a fugitive Jamaican slave named Savanna, arrives on Adeline's doorstep and, from an overwhelming sense of gratitude, determines to devote her life to serving Adeline. Shortly thereafter, Glenmurray succumbs to his illness, and Adeline, who sustains philosophical objections to the institution of marriage, bows to convention and propriety by contracting a miserable marriage with Glenmurray's first cousin, Charles Berrendale.
Early reviewers, modern critics, and Opie's several biographers3 have read Adeline Mowbray for its ambiguous views on marriage and as a fictional version of...