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.
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
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...
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Charlotte Yonge
Her vindication of unmarried women drawing intellectual and social authority from their relationship with the Church of England
brings to mind Mary Astell
. She appears to have learned from women writers like Sarah Trimmer
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Mary Masters
At the end of the volume comes a stop-press addition: six letters added at the Request of some of her Friends,
qtd. in
Masters, Mary. Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions. D. Henry and R. Cave, 1755.
309
of which two are feminist in tone. MM
here praises the writings of...
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Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Her choice of Descartes is interesting in view of his particular interest for such proto-feminist writers as Mary Astell
in the early eighteenth century. Her other two essays on philosophy were about John Locke
and...
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Jane Harvey
In addition to quotation from Milton
, Pope
, and Thomson
, this book has a Sterne
an flavour, with passages titled from sights (like The Theatre Royal and The Merchants's Court) alternating with...
Textual Features
Mary Hays
Among the book's contents are poems and fiction (including dream visions and an Oriental tale. Titles like Cleora, or the Misery Attending Unsuitable Connections and Josepha, or pernicious Effects of early Indulgence foreground Hays's didactic...
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Charlotte Forman
With probably pleasurable irony and in the tradition of Mary Astell
and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
, this essay presents its author as a great admirer of the literary productions of the fair sex, which...
Textual Production
Jane Lead
The Theosophical Transactions attracted much attention to JL
's existing and forthcoming publications as well as to her ideas and her circle. It also included excerpts of work by others, including Mary Astell
. It...
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Judith Drake
In the late 1990s, a bookshop offered for sale a two-leaf poem which seems to come from a longer work entitled To the Most Ingenious Mrs. — . . . Defence of Her Sex...
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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...
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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)...
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Anne Finch
AF
wrote a religious poem for the occasion, addressed to her friend Lady Catherine Jones
(who was also a friend of Mary Astell
).
Finch, Anne. The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. Editors McGovern, Barbara and Charles H. Hinnant, University of Georgia Press, 1998.
126ff
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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, 1999.
240-1
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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...
