“No other air, and no better water, than were to be obtained in her native parish”: The Intellectual World of Jane Taylor’s Display: A Tale for Young People

Jane Taylor’s 1815 novel Display: A Tale for Young People charts the various conflicting forces facing young women—performative, religious, intellectual, familial, and emotional—in a small provincial town. The novel tells the story of two young friends, Emily and Elizabeth, whose settled existence is disturbed and reshaped by the arrival of a family of outsiders. The new perspectives and widened intellectual horizons thus offered influence the girls’ choices, demonstrate their different characters, and test their resilience, in both action and reflection. The conventional, time-honoured customs of the village in which they live, its relaxed and pro forma religious observance, and the assumption that every young woman’s story must end in marriage are seen, in the light of these new possibilities, to be in need of revision.