Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term ‘Romanticism’ has a much wider meaning

 It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Romantic period lasts about forty years, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Reform Act of 1832. It is sometimes called the Age of Revolutions. Well, let's talk about the writers of that time and what they wrote.

Writers such as Thomas de Quincey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt changed the styles and topics of the 18th century essay and also created new forms in which their personal impressions and the subjects of everyday life were central. Thomas Love Peacok, whose work was written in the Romantic and Victorian periods, satirises some of the main Romantic ideas and lifestyles in novels such as «Nightmare Abbey», in which the main characters are based on Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. The most important novelists of the time were Jane Austen and Walter Scott. There were also famous women writers such us Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, both Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve wrote Gothic novels which were popular for their exciting plots. A later Gothic novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818), shows an extraordinary world in which a living being is made by a Genevan student from the bones of the dead, but becomes a monster which nobody can control. The monster murders Frankenstein’s brother and his wife and finally Frankenstein himself. The novel shows the interest of the Romantics in the supernatural and in the attempts of man to be as powerful as God. Frankenstein can be seen as one of the first modern science fiction novels.

Jane Austen is different from other writers of her time, because her main interest is in the moral, social and psychological behaviour of her characters. She writes mainly about young heroines as they grow up and search for personal happiness. Jane Austen’s pictures are detailed, often ironic, and always about a small number of people. She doesn’t write about the Napoleonic Wars or the social and political issues and crises of her age, but her observations of people apply to human nature in general. She gives her main characters choices and then shows how and why the make the choices.

The Romantics were poets of change. They found constants in nature and in art, but they could also see the new dangers of the modern world, and in many of their writings the security of the individual is threatened. The Romantic period was a time in which prose writing developed rapidly., Writers such as Thomas de Quincey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt changed the styles and topics of the 18th century essay and also created new forms in which their personal impressions and the subjects of everyday life were central.