‘It was the Romantics’, wrote Mario Praz in 1933, ‘who gave a psychological turn to the refinements of perversity’. A word like ‘refinements’ mines perversity, even perversion, for its aesthetic qualities. With Praz’s The Romantic Agony, Romantic literature began to be appreciated as a wellspring of transgressive sexual fantasies; such fantasies became central to ‘Romanticism’ as a literary movement. In the decades since, Praz’s insights, if not his methodologies, have been durable. For instance, our own era’s most meticulous historicist study of Romantic era sexuality, Richard C. Sha’s Perverse Romanticism (2009), finds that ‘Perversion enables us to reimagine Romanticism from the ground up’, a claim that distinctly echoes Praz’s findings, despite their very different methods and archives. Sha shows, as Praz had, how sex became slowly separated from function during the Romantic period to become some thing aesthetic, and thus purposeless, and thus perverse. Like Praz, Sha endeavours to trace ‘lost histories of subversion within perversion’; also like Praz, he focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on male writers.

The contributors to Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression, Sha included, are bent on recovering such lost histories from within the universe of Romantic-era women’s writing. This is necessary not just for inclusion’s sake but also because, as James Penney argues, the encounter with sexual difference is crucial if we are to ascertain ‘the inherently antinormative quality of sexual desire’.