Karen O'Brien

Standard Name: O'Brien, Karen

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Damaris Masham
She was an Anglican : questioning on issues of religion, but a firm believer. Historian Karen O'Brien places her as a late Latudinarian, belonging to a group within the Church of England which was...
Literary responses Sarah Scott
O'Brien finds this a leaden collage of sources.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
208
Literary responses Jemima Kindersley
Historian Karen O'Brien , who expresses regret that the rest of Kindersley's original essays remained unpublished, calls her a notable example of a female disciple of Montesquieu who also appears to have absorbed some elements...
Literary responses Damaris Masham
George Ballard , in compiling his Memoirs of Eminent Ladies, praised the Observations which the Virtuous and excellently knowing LadyDM made in this book on the Tyrannick Insolence, Oppressive and Monopilizing Tempers of...
Literary responses Lucy Aikin
The Critical Review praised the work, not as great poetry but for its information, good sense, and justness of thinking. It put forward gendered reasons for its praise: not gallantry, but because we are happy...
Literary responses Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
William Beckford , who had already demonstrated his hostility to women writers, annotated his copy of this work (which is now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University ). He uses Benger as an example...
Literary responses Elizabeth Burnet
She became widely known and admired as the author of this text.Anne Kelley has commented on the Whig political theory contained in it,
Kelley, Anne. “Her Zeal for the Publick Good: The Political Agenda in Elizabeth Burnets A Method of Devotion (1708)”. Womens Writing, Vol.
13
, No. 3, 2006, pp. 448-74.
452
while Karen O'Brien sees EB as one of those women...
Literary responses Catharine Trotter
In the original Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen accused CT not only of inconsistency in switching her allegiance from Locke to Samuel Clarke, but also of being too obtuse to perceive her own...
Literary responses Catherine Talbot
The Critical Review gave this book two sentences, saying it was written in the usual strain of religious meditations.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
29 (1770): 478
Karen O'Brien judges it and Talbot's other posthumously printed works intellectually thin gruel...
Literary responses Sarah Scott
Karen O'Brien sees this book as fast-paced and highly engaging.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
207
and as realising, together with Scott's other two works of historical biography, the exemplary and affective potential of the genre.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
206
and
Literary responses Sarah Scott
O'Brien sees even in this potboiler the signs of Scott's robust political intelligence.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
208
politics Elizabeth Burnet
EB was a passionate supporter of the Revolution Settlement of 1688-9.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She was patriot enough to tell Sarah Churchill that the news of the victory of Blenheim made her really giddy with joy.
qtd. in
Kirchberger, C. “Elizabeth Burnet, 1661-1709”. Church Quarterly Review, Vol.
148
, No. 295, Apr.–June 1949, pp. 17-51.
24
Her...
Textual Features Catharine Trotter
This is not only her first
Kelley, Anne. Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism. Ashgate, 2002.
178
but also, says Karen O'Brien , her fullest engagement with the thinking of Samuel Clarke , from its opening assertion that the obligation to moral virtue is ultimately...
Textual Features Catherine Talbot
Karen O'Brien finds both this and Talbot's Essays on Various Subjectshaunted by an acute sense of the pointlessness of the author's constricted female existence.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
64
She both makes this feeling emblematic of the earthbound...
Textual Production Elizabeth Montagu
Karen O'Brien argues that Lyttelton 's monumental History of the Life of King Henry the Second, 1767-71, was, in part, the result of intellectual collaboration with Montagu.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
140

Timeline

1724: William Law answered Bernard Mandeville in...

Writing climate item

1724

William Law answered Bernard Mandeville in Remarks upon a Late Book, Entituled, The Fable of the Bees, arguing that moral or immoral behaviour is chosen rather than socially conditioned.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.

By October 1779: William Alexander argued strongly in his...

Building item

By October 1779

William Alexander argued strongly in his History of Women that an index to the place of any culture in the scale of civil society is its treatment of its women.
Alexander, William, 1742 - 1788, and Jane Rendall. History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time. Thoemmes Press, 1995, 2 vols., http://U of A Ruth N .
1: 151
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
48 (1779): 255-61
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
104-6

Texts

O’Brien, Karen. Feminist Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
O’Brien, Karen. “Woman’s Place”. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690-1750, edited by Ros Ballaster, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 19-39.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.