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.
HW
says she has more respect for the upper classes than some of our modern reformists.
Wells, Helena. Letters on Subjects of Importance to the Happiness of Young Females. L. Peacock; W. Creech.
7
She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...
Textual Features
Charlotte Yonge
The second volume is again rich in women's writing. Its first item is Elizabeth Gunning
's Family Stories; or, Evenings at my Grandmother's. CY
mentions with approval another item, A Puzzle for a Curious...
Textual Features
Mary Stott
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Production
Maria Jane Jewsbury
After MJJ
's death, Anne Katharine Elwood
reported at second hand a story that Jewsbury intended to update and recast Mary Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she thought could...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB
's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth
in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...