Diamonds and jewels – their brilliant refractions providing prototypes for intellectual elasticity and insight into connections between things and gender, colonialism, marriage for hire, and ecosystems – spring forth in Belinda and Les bijoux indiscrets to teach characters to become better interpreters. This chapter argues that in these novels gems become “mouths” that kinesthetically narrate and enact material histories: the labor and commerce that produced them, the deleterious enmeshment of women and objects, and women’s right to be human – that is, honest, rational, fragmented, stained, and radiant. Belinda’s allusion to the historic 48-carat Pigot links domestic larceny in matchmaking to colonial theft in India and Ireland. Markets collide as Belinda demonstrates how the lexicon of purity and perfection dominates the commercialization of courtship and of advisory treatises instructing the public how to buy authentic diamonds. In conclusion, the chapter analyzes how a diamond leads to Lady Delacour’s restoration by teaching her how to belong with the human–nonhuman network.

This chapter charts how Paul et Virginie manifests the degradation in the human – thing relationship from intimacy to estrangement; I further show how later artists and writers reincarnate the novel in “after-books” and in “after-art”—wallpaper, paintings, fans and plates. The novel’s insistence on splitting body from spirit, sexuality from virtue, and human from nonhuman leads to sacrificing the heroine’s life to reinforce the illusion of female purity. This sacrifice reinstates binaries partially transcended in the novel’s earlier sections when the characters’ respect for and kinesthetic engagement with the environment intensifies love and gives them the right to belong with each other and with the nonhuman. The chapter argues that after-things reimagine Bernardin’s novel in fresh ways, all of them contending with Paul et Virginie’s ultimate dualism: some recapitulate or complicate that binary thinking; some obliterate Bernardin’s protest against enslavement; and others forge a belonging with between human and nonhuman by restoring Paul and Virginie to life and happiness.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

Chapter 4 reveals the extent of Maria Edgeworth's participation in a form of networked authorship borne out in interactions with her family, previous texts, reviewers, and readers, which can be discerned within her revisions to four of her major novels: Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814), Harrington (1817), and Helen (1834).Her post-publication revisions to Belinda and Patronage are linked, especially in the case of the latter, to her interest in scientific and scholarly knowledge and her struggle to moderate her didactic moralism.This book discusses, for the first time, an early fragmentary version of Harrington, which contained an anti-semitic first-person narrator, which was removed before publication.Edgeworth’s published version was a departure from her usual didacticism, which she attenuated once more in the 1825 edition.Her final novel Helen and her unfinished fiction Take for Granted attest to, perhaps more than any other novels in this project, their collaborative origins: they were influenced by her family and her readers at all stages of the composition process.