The height of what Parisians called "The Terror" occurred in 1789; only four years later, Mary Wollstonecraft's essays on the rights of women were published. Romanticism was on the decline; Realism and its attendant social reform was rising, and Wollstonecraft's works propose the revolutionary thought that women need education and self-actualization, and that the current system of training them to be wives and mothers leaves them unfit as either. Wollstonecraft ends with a rallying cry: "How can women be just and generous when they are the slaves of injustice?"
Two years after Wollstonecraft's publication, the first British burst of protest against established religion came from William Blake, whose poetic volumes "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" give a revolutionary twist to sacred reflection. An innocence song, "The Lamb" traditionally depicts a lamb as Christ's gentle creation; however, a song of experience, "The Tyger," blasphemously speaks of God as sadistic creator: "Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee?" Blake foreshadows the upheavals against traditional religion to come.
A scant 20 years after the Terror, Jane Austen's first novel, "Persuasion," was published, causing minor upheavals in British perceptions of sexual politics. Austen's heroines, both in her first book and those to come, are single-minded women with fire and spirit, who seem to embody the enlightened females that Wollstonecraft predicted. Even the fact that Austen ends each of her novels, from "Pride and Prejudice" to "Emma," with convenient marriages for her female protagonists does not dampen her -- or their -- revolutionary spark, wit and intelligence.
Fifty years post-Terror, Charles Dickens brought forth "Oliver Twist," which he followed with numerous other works that call for the reform of British industry, including the poor laws and social services. Dickens capped his career with "Tale of Two Cities," a novel about the French Revolution. The historical spark that lit Britain's literary torch for five decades became its emblematic novelist's plot half a century later.