Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel
Women's Lives and the 18th-century English Novel

Author: Elizabeth Bergen Brophy

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 9780813010366

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Novels of the eighteenth century usually offer wedded bliss as a reward to their heroines. How did these novels affect—and how were they affected by—the women who were reading them? By drawing upon thousands of unpublished documents from the era, written by more than 250 women, Brophy creates a picture of the real lives of eighteenth-century women and then examines the work of seven novelists in relation to this portrait. Excerpts from letters, diaries, and journals, written by women ranging from servants to nobility, reveal the stages of feminine life in the 1700s: dutiful daughter, courted maiden, obedient wife, and pitiful widow or spinster. Their lives are assessed against those portrayed in the works of seven novelists—five women (Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Fanny Burney) and two men (Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson). Fiction both reflects and creates the values of its time. In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded as every woman's vocation and the novel often reinforced this conviction. “Only leave me myself,” the heroine's plea in Richardson's Clarissa, laments the dependent position of women in the age. However, the novel also influenced the self-perception of eighteenth-century women in a positive way, Brophy asserts, by admiring their intelligence, by condemning sexual transgressions in and out of marriage, and, most important, by placing women at the center of their own stories, as heroines in their own right. The abundant primary materials and straightforward writing in Women's Lives and the Eigtheenth-Century English Novel make this a book of interest to scholars of social and cultural history and to students of the novel.

Material Lives
Material Lives

Author: Serena Dyer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-28

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350126985

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Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Author: John Richetti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-09-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521429450

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In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England
Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England

Author: Rosemary Sweet

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1351872117

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Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns, remarkably little has focused upon, or even reflected upon the distinctive experience of women in the urban context. Much of what research there is has explored the experience of laboring or impoverished women, or women of the social elite; by contrast, the essays in this collection take up the study of the participation of middling women in urban life. This volume brings into sharper focus the relationship between changes consequent upon urban development and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century. The contributors address such themes as the extent to which to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; the place of women's networks in the economic, political and social life of the town and the distinctive role played by women in areas such as philanthropy and business; and how the development of urban society in turn inflected contemporary conceputalizations of gender.

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the 'Scandalous Memoir'
Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the 'Scandalous Memoir'

Author: Caroline Breashears

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-06

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 3319486551

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This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.

Ends of Empire
Ends of Empire

Author: Laura Brown

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780801480959

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This book explores the representation of women in english literature from the Restoration to the fall of Walpole.

Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Author: Deborah Simonton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1134774923

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The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.

Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Author: April London

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-06-28

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1139426206

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This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels advanced several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the self-possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Two contemporary models for the defining of selfhood through reference to property structure the book, one historical (classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism), and the other literary (pastoral and georgic). These paradigms offer a cultural context for the analysis of both canonical and less well-known writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West. While this study focuses on fiction from 1740–1800, it also draws on the historiography, literary criticism and philosophy of the period, and on recent feminist and cultural studies.

The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-century Circle of Acquaintance
The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-century Circle of Acquaintance

Author: Temma F. Berg

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780754655992

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"While most of the letter writers are unknown, four achieved prominence - the author Charlotte Lennox, the Reverend Thomas Winstanley, the navigator Charles Clerke, and the bluestocking Susannah Dobson. This book presents new perspectives on Lennox's and Winstanley's domestic lives, Clerke's ambiguous encounters with indigenous peoples, and Dobson's mysterious sexuality." "This book will appeal to eighteenth-century scholars as well as to scholars in women's and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to postcolonial, queer, and other literary theorists."--BOOK JACKET.