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 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...
Textual Production
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
LMWM
and Mary Astell
wrote, on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, polemical poems on the death of the fourteen-year-old bride Eleanor Bowes (née Verney
), denouncing the institution of marriage.
Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Clarendon.
240-1
Textual Production
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Masters
A few of the letters discuss female friendship and feminist opinion, as if seeking to raise the consciousness of the recipient. Some in this category occur at random among other letters. Most treat topics of...
Textual Features
Mary Masters
At the end of the volume comes a stop-press addition: six letters added at the Request of some of her Friends,
Masters, Mary. Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions. D. Henry and R. Cave.
309
of which two are feminist in tone. MM
here praises the writings of...
Textual Production
Damaris Masham
The attribution to her in some quarters of Astell
's Serious Proposal (published in July 1694 as by a Lover of her Sex) may have made DM
wish to distance herself from Astell. Here...
Textual Production
Damaris Masham
Boyer made the ascription in the 1705 volume of his annual series The History of the Reign of Queen Anne.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Masham claimed in her preface to have written this work (during leisure Hours)...
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...
Textual Features
Mary, Lady Chudleigh
MLC
's occasions include the public and private. She opens with an ode on the recent death of the queen's only surviving child
, in which the speaker, unconventionally, rejects the consolation duly offered by...
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...
politics
Harriet Martineau
HM
revelled in her single state and proclaimed herself probably the happiest single woman in England.
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago.
1: 133
In keeping with the general interest among earlier Victorian feminists in the potential of sisterhoods, an article...
Literary responses
Delarivier Manley
By linking her with Astell
(as author of Bart'lemy Fair) he made it clear that the issue was her gender at least as much as her politics. She, meanwhile, maintained that she produced the...
Reception
Bathsua Makin
Frances Teague
noted that by the 1990s most readers were finding the Essay (which is now rare) overcautious.
Teague, Frances. Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning. Bucknell University Press.
95
Yet in 1992 a copy of it was offered for sale at £3,500, while Astell
Intertextuality and Influence
Catharine Macaulay
The letters are addressed to Hortensia (the name of a Roman matron who acted against gender convention by speaking publicly in the Forum against a proposed tax on women).
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
