Cambridge University Press

Karen O'Brien

Standard Name: O'Brien, Karen

Connections

Connections Sort descending	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. 208
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. 29 (1770): 478 Karen O'Brien judges it and Talbot's other posthumously printed works intellectually thin gruel...
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	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	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 Burnet’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>A Method of Devotion</span> (1708)”. Women’s Writing, Vol. 13 , No. 3, pp. 448-74. 452 while Karen O'Brien sees EB as one of those women...
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Jemima Kindersley	Historian Karen O'Brien , who expresses regret that the rest of Kindersley's original essays remained unpublished, calls her a notable example of a female disciple of Montesquieu who also appears to have absorbed some elements...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	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. 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. 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. 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. Kirchberger, C. “Elizabeth Burnet, 1661-1709”. Church Quarterly Review, Vol. 148 , No. 295, pp. 17-51. 24 Her...
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. 64 She both makes this feeling emblematic of the earthbound...
Textual Features	Catharine Trotter	This is not only her first Kelley, Anne. Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism. Ashgate. 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 Production	Lucy Aikin	Her model for this genre was Elizabeth Hamilton , but the influence of Catharine Macaulay is discerned by Karen O'Brien in Aikin's Whig positioning and in her self-confidently judgemental tone. O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press. 218 This work was reissued...

Timeline

1724

William Law answeredBernard 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.

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.

Texts

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.