A contemporary compilation treating 63 notable individuals. "It is the first serious biographical investigation of bluestocking women ... Ranging from the 15th to the 18th century, the 63 portraits include those of Constantina Grierson, one of the most gifted members of the circle of women around Swift; the poet and essayist Lady Chudleigh; the diarist Elizabeth Bury; and the polemicist and feminist Mary Astell."Bookdealer's description.
This wide-ranging examination of the genres of early modern women's writing embraces translation in the fields of theological discourse, romance and classical tragedy, original meditations and prayers, letters and diaries, poetry, closet drama, advice manuals, and prophecies and polemics.
"The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760" by Myra Reynolds Myra Reynolds was an American literary scholar. Her work and dedication to her studies allowed her to pen this book that encompasses women's history in England over the course of a little more than a century. Written in an easy-to-understand way, the book discusses the ways in which women were educated during the evolutions seen in the country during these years.
If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century. Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.
During the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this period.
This volume charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.
This is the first study of the posthumous life of Aphra Behn, the extraordinary vicissitudes of her critical reception, and the personal vilifications of her reputation through three centuries. Beginning with the reception of Behn's work during her lifetime, which she herself helped to orchestrate by performing herself as a seductive woman, a beleaguered lady writer, and a serious intellectual, among other roles, the work ends with the late 20th-century reception of Behn, when the interest in gender, race, and class has made of her almost a postmodern writer. In the 17th century she was seen as a playwright of sexy and propagandist comedies, and attacked by those who disapproved her supposedly unfeminine stance and her royalist politics. Later, as the Restoration period itself fell into disrepute, Behn's plays were denigrated along with those of her fellow men, but greater opprobrium fell on her as a woman, because in the 19th century it was felt that a female writer should have higher morals than a man. During this period, Behn's reputation was exceedingly low, while her short story Oroonoko gained acclaim, freed from any association with its author or her supposedly squalid times. In the 18th and 19th centuries Oroonoko moved from being viewed as political commentary and heroic romance to a sentimental tale of doomed love and then an abolitionist text. In the early twentieth century it was hailed as one of the earliest realist texts, part of the great English ascent into the novel. JANET TODD is professor of English at the University of East Anglia
The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional, second marriage. This comprehensive biography in the 'life and letters' tradition situates her works in their political and social contexts and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight-volume history of England and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were characteristic of those enlightenment republicans who grounded their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth-century levellers and parliamentarians as important precursors who had advocated the liberty and political rights she aspired to see implemented in Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to some contemporary accounts of the character and origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period.
