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.
She altered or misremembered the date she gave the final letter in her book; the corresponding actual letter could not have been written on that day. Mary Astell
added her feminist paratext, in prose and...
Literary responses
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The praise by Astell
, and by an anonymous poet who also attached a compliment to the manuscript, shows a recognition that this was a landmark text in women's writing. A considerable critical literature has...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
This is an extension of The School for Widows: it argues for reform (including improved education for women) as a preventative for revolution. Its ideas, however, may sound reactionary, and its version of gender-roles...
Textual Features
Mrs Ross
Among a large cast, Mrs Charlton (who has a protegee, the daughter of her early love, who is intensely but secretly unhappy) and Mrs Finch are old maids and glad to be so. Althea (youngest...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Susanna Haswell Rowson
Rowson's Outline of Universal History includes a defence of history as a study for young women. It is, she writes, only some persons of the opposite sex who fail to realise that history is the...
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...
politics
Sarah Scott
They believed that women could think and write in freedom only outside relationships with men. Although Mary Astell
's writing influenced them, they insisted that women must be involved in society and not withdraw into...
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Thomas
This collection contains the harvest of Thomas's poetic career. Her Muse, she says, is unfashionably incapable of dealing with love or obscenity: this shows clearly that her original poetic context was a Restoration one.
Thomas, Elizabeth. Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects. Thomas Combes.
50-1
Textual Features
Elizabeth Thomas
These letters provide a vivid picture of ET's life: her cultured friends, her alertness to read and comment on new and old books (she and Gwinnett discuss Locke
, Malebranche
, Norris
, Astell
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...
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...
