This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s engagement with narratives of property and property society in Smith and Rousseau, as reflected in her A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In political economy’s imaginary, the figure of property encapsulates the ambivalences at the heart of late eighteenth-century modernity and poses questions of affective response and social relation which were fundamental to political economy’s account of social origin. Wollstonecraft’s attention to property of many kinds on her travels is read as an on-going critique of the contemporary political economic order, as well as attempts to imagine alternatives to it, such as the independent, comfortable existence suggested by the farmstead or cottage. Literary form emerges as a means through which questions of human personality and identity in commercial modernity might be framed, and as a means of insisting on ‘something’ more than the mediated social relations of market society’s ‘society of strangers’.

A postlude acts as a précis of my argument about honor across the Romantic period. In the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands – the popular 1857 autobiography from a Creole nurse known as “the Other Florence Nightingale” – we witness the complex legacy of feminist honor in the literature of the black diaspora. Building her reputation at the height of Britain’s imperial conquests, Seacole seems to embrace the “manly” liberal-republican values that Mary Wollstonecraft urged women to adopt. But Seacole also deliberately cultivates her outsider status, especially within the colonial borderlands’ autonomous black collectives, where mutualist activity happens beyond the sanctioned, Western apparatus of respect.

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.