Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Standard Name: Wollstonecraft, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Wollstonecraft
Married Name: Mary Godwin
Pseudonym: Mr Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution
Pseudonym: M.
Pseudonym: W.
MW
has a distinguished historical place as a feminist: as theorist, critic and reviewer, novelist, and especially as an activist for improving women's place in society. She also produced pedagogy or conduct writing, an anthology, translation, history, analysis of politics as well as gender politics, and a Romantic account of her travels in Scandinavia.
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Textual Features
Hannah More
HM
writes her Hints in full political consciousness of the likelihood that she is trying to shape a future ruler. Her claim to have remained uninfluenced by Wollstonecraft
or Catharine Macaulay
(whom she called patriotic...
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George Eliot
Miss Arrowpoint saves herself, while Mirah, the young Jewish woman whom Daniel eventually marries, needs him to save her from a suicide attempt reminiscent of that of Mary Wollstonecraft
. Gwendolen, at the climactic moment...
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Susanna Haswell Rowson
Contents include lives of Elizabeth Singer Rowe
and of Mary Wollstonecraft
(the latter reprinted from the Monthly Visitor of London). Among the poems (some of them specifically attributed to SHR
) are one entitled...
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Muriel Jaeger
MJ
here traces the shift from eighteenth-century tolerance and scepticism to Victorian religious earnestness. She makes good use of writing during these periods, including writing by women (novels, diaries, letters, memoirs), showing herself a highly...
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Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
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Anna Wheeler
The Appeal begins with an Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler in which William Thompson
expresses his reasons for writing the Appeal: an attempt to arrange the expression of those feelings, sentiments, and reasonings, which...
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Edith Sitwell
This book depends on poking fun at its subjects, and invites its readers to join in Sitwell's superior amusement. Some of her subjects deserve better, like Margaret Fuller
, who (despite the adjective in the...
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Sarah Trimmer
This use of instruction cards was innovative, at least in England. ST
may or may not have known of the cards issued by Sarah Scott
and Lady Barbara Montagu
in April 1759 (which failed as...
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Hannah Brand
This heroic tragedy (full title Huniades; or, The Siege of Belgrade) is given with passages restored that were omitted in performance. It is set in 1456 (three years after Constantinople, capital of the Christian...
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Hannah Cowley
For her preface HC
clearly felt the need to back-pedal. I protest I know nothing about politics; will Miss Wolstonecraft
forgive me—whose book contains such a body of mind as I hardly ever met with—if...
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Ann Bridge
Though the authors declare on their opening page that the modern need is to supplement the exhaustive Baedeker with a selective guidebook (something designed to tell travellers what they cannot afford to miss), they actually...
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
66
and of Catharine Macaulay
; she emphasises Macaulay's concern with the moral problem of oppression and inequity, and her desire that...
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Eliza Fenwick
This epistolary novel, set mainly in a castle with secret passages connecting to a monastic ruin , deals with strictly contemporary issues of power and independence. It reflects the influence of EF
's friend Wollstonecraft
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
EF
's letters, vividly written, full of ironic self-awareness, make an excellent source for her life. They reflect her powerful feelings for her children, ambivalent feelings about her experience of authorship, her continuing interest in...
