Eighteenth-century women writers believed that the novel was the best vehicle to educate women and offer them a true picture of their lives and "wrongs". Adelina Mowbray is the result of Opie's desire to fulfil this important task. Opie does not try to offer her female readers alternatives to their present predicament or an idealized future, but makes them aware of the fact that the only ones who get victimized in a patriarchal system are always the powerless, that is to say, women. She gives us a dark image of the vulnerability of married women and points out not only how uncommon the ideal of companionate marriage was in real life, but also the difficulty of finding the appropriate partner for an egalitarian relationship. Lastly, she shows that there is now social forgiveness for those who transgress the established boundaries, which becomes obvious in the attitude of two of the most compassionate and generous characters of the novel, Rachel Pemberton and Emma Douglas, towards Adelina.Amelia Opie was one of the most popular and celebrated authors during the 1800s and 1810s, whose techniques and themes reveal her to be a representative woman novelist of her time. Unfortunately, her achievements were eclipsed by those of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Charles Dickens or the Brontës, and for a long time her work remained entirely forgotten. However, in the last years there has been a growing interest to recover and reappraise her novels and poems, trying to establish links between Opie and other late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century women writers. In contrast to contemporary reviewers who emphasized the conservative and anti-Jacobin message of her novels and tales, most twentieth-century critics have defended the dialogical quality of her work, or, in other words, the way in which Opie appears to endorse the status quo, while criticizing those social institutions, such as

Howard Jacobson is a British author who is proud of being labelled a Jewish writer and does not hesitate to describe himself as ‘entirely and completely Jewish’. He believes that English-Jewish writers should address directly the challenge of being Jewish, which is precisely what he does in The Mighty Walzer (1999). The novel shows once again Jacobson’s greatness as a comic novelist and thus reinforces his assumption that the ingenious, joking Jew is the Jew in essence. Like many scholars, Jacobson believes that self-aimed humour has allowed Jewish people to cope with the paradoxical nature of their culture and historical situation. In The Mighty Walzer Jacobson proves to be the Jew par excellence by joking about everything from religion to food, making fun of the contradictions and incongruities of Jewish life.

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