Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Astell
-
Standard Name: Astell, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Astell
Pseudonym: A Lover of Her Sex
Pseudonym: The Author of the Proposal to the Ladies
Pseudonym: The Reflector
Pseudonym: Tom Single
Pseudonym: A very Moderate Person and Dutiful Subject of the
Queen
Pseudonym: A Daughter of the Church of England
Pseudonym: Mr Wotton
Best known as a feminist theorist and polemicist, MA
is also a fine poet and an energetic and funny controversialist on the political affairs of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. A High Anglican and High Tory in politics, she was nevertheless outspokenly radical about matters concerning gender. Her regular publisher, Rich or Richard Wilkin
, was known for his piety.
A few of the letters discuss female friendship and feminist opinion, as if seeking to raise the consciousness of the recipient. Some in this category occur at random among other letters. Most treat topics of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Constantia Grierson
Other poems in the manuscript include advice to young women (a topic CG
also pursued in a prose piece), expressions of female aspiration and solidarity and of fervent religious belief (for instance in a prayer-poem...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah, Lady Cowper
The diary's first volume opens with a preface which expresses conventional modesty bluntly, without the customary effort at elegance or grace: Books generally begin with a Preface which draws in the Reader to go on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Drake
Her remark that English women are born slaves,
Drake, Judith. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. A. Roper, E. Wilkinson, and R. Clavel, http://U of A, Special Collections.
22
like black plantation labourers, may have given the phrase to Mary Astell
, whose use of it is famous.
She later told Anne Dewes
that she blamed herself for having neglected several overtures of acquaintance, especially the one which Lady Betty Hastings made through the intermediary of Mary Astell
while William Elstob was still...
SC
was a great networker. Having met George Ballard
, a local man (perhaps because her sister was a patient of his mother, who was a midwife), she introduced him to Elizabeth Elstob
and to...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Thomas
She was a friend of John Norris of Bemerton
from about 1695, or sixteen years before his death.
Curll, Edmund et al. “The Life of Corinna. Written by Herself”. Pylades and Corinna, p. iv - lxxx.
xii-xiii
Norris advised her on her study of French, and on not taking time from her serious...
Friends, Associates
Mary, Lady Chudleigh
MLC
's circle of friends was largely maintained by correspondence. She discussed literary and philosophical ideas with John Dryden
, Mary Astell
(Almystrea in Chudleigh's poetry), Elizabeth Thomas
, and other women who are...
Friends, Associates
Anne Finch
AF
enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken
. She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones
, to whom...
Family and Intimate relationships
Jane Squire
JS
might be related (her father had several brothers) to the high-church John Squire
of St Leonard's parish, Shoreditch, who is mentioned in The Sufferings of the Clergy, 1714, by John Walker
(with...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
Her mother, born Mary Gilbert
, from a gentry family in Hertfordshire, was her father's second wife, married more than twenty years after the death of his first. (That first wife, the beautiful, scholarly, fourteen-year-old...
Dedications
Aphra Behn
According to its title-page, it was published in 1689.
O’Donnell, Mary Ann. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Garland.
155
It was dedicated to Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin
, now settled in England (who had been, like Behn's former dedicatee Nell Gwyn, a mistress...
Dedications
Elizabeth Tipper
The title-page continues: The Pilgrim's Viaticum; or, The Destitute, but not Forlorn, Being a Divine Poem, Digested from Meditations upon the Holy Scripture. The title-page quotes Psalm 119, about loving God's law. This...
