The first three volumes of Thomas Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor were published in 1794, the final three in 1797, the year of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. This brief span marks the high point of what conservatives derogatively branded “Jacobin” fiction. While many of the heterodox ideas embraced by Holcroft were in circulation before the 1790s, they had been given fresh impetus by the paper war that followed Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Reformist and radical critiques of what Wollstonecraft labeled Burke’s “rhetorical flourishes and infantine sensibility” drew sharp rejoinders from loyalists, initiating a spiraling debate that continued throughout the revolutionary decade.1 Key to the contention was the shared belief in an untapped audience susceptible to arguments for wide-scale change. Across the political spectrum, writers acted on their commitment to win adherents to their causes by exploiting the novel’s appeal to this emergent readership. Hugh Trevor testifies to the genre’s influence in its assessments of different print kinds and in the transformative energy sparked by the characters’ persuasive speech. The formal and thematic repertoire Holcroft deployed in his proselytizing efforts, including the reflexive interest in writing, matches with the practice of other novelists in the Godwin circle. In Mary: A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), however, Wollstonecraft departs significantly from the standards of her male colleagues. Hugh Trevor helps to illuminate the points at which her compliance with Jacobin conventions yields to a different set of preoccupations, many of which she held in common with Utopian authors and with women writers such as Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Eliza Fenwick.