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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Anthologization | Judith Drake | The lengthy title lists the satirical sketches that the work contains. English Short Title Catalogue. |
Cultural formation | Ann Cook | AC
, apparently English and presumably white, presents an interesting study in class consciousness. She links herself with poor, low Servants in indignation at their treatment by the gentry class. She hints that her parents... |
death | John Norris | JN
, philospher, clergyman, and friend of Mary Astell
, died at his parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire, the place with which his name is generally associated. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. |
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, 1986. 155 |
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... |
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... |
Friends, Associates | John Norris | JN
conducted correspondences with a number of learned women: Mary, Lady Chudleigh
(who visited him at his home), Damaris, Lady Masham
(with whom his relationship ended in difference of opinion), and Elizabeth Thomas
, all... |
Friends, Associates | Sarah Chapone | SC
's friendship with John Wesley
continued after her marriage, and included Wesley's brother Charles
, Mary Pendarves (later Delany)
, and Mary's sister Anne Granville
, who stayed at her house for a week... |
Friends, Associates | Elizabeth Elstob | She later told Anne Dewes
that she blamed herself for having neglected several overtures of acquaintance, especially the one which |
Friends, Associates | Sarah Chapone | 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 | 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 | Elizabeth Thomas | She was a friend of John Norris of Bemerton
from about 1695, or sixteen years before his death. Curll, Edmund, Elizabeth Thomas, and Richard Gwinnett. “The Life of Corinna. Written by Herself”. Pylades and Corinna, 1731, p. iv - lxxx. xii-xiii |
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... |
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... |
Timeline
1628
Publication began of the legal treatise known to later generations as Coke upon Littleton: The first part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, or a Commentarie upon Littleton by jurist Sir Edward Coke
.
1656
Abraham Cowley
published Poems; this volume, which included his Pindaric Odes and Miscellanies, confirmed his stature as the leading poet of the day.
1670
Les Pensées de M. Pascal
sur la réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets was posthumously published: it takes the form of a collection of aphorisms and very brief essays.
1680
Josiah Priest
and his wife moved their girls' boarding school from Leicester Fields in London to Chelsea, where they took over an existing school in Gorges House.
1 April 1684
George Hickes
(later a patron of Elizabeth Elstob
) preached at St Bridget's Church in London a sermon on almsgiving which made particular mention of charities to benefit women, including schools and colleges along the...
January 1697
Daniel Defoe
proposed in his early publication An Essay upon Projects (advertised for sale this month) the founding of an academy for women.
1697
John Evelyn
included in his Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Ancient and Modern a list of women famed for writing: Margaret Cavendish
, Katherine Philips
, Aphra Behn
, Bathsua Makin
, and Mary Astell
.
1707
George Hickes
published, as Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, a translation of Fénelon
's Traité de l'éducation des filles, 1687.
Before 21 October 1714
June 1816
Lady Isabella King
opened at Bailbrook House near Bath a communal home for single gentlewomen (or Protestant nunnery): a project going back to Mary Astell
, which King picked up from Sarah Scott
's Millenium Hall.