Mary Astell

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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.
Title-page of Mary Astell's "A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their true and greatest Interest", part 1, third revised edition, dated 1696, published as "By a Lover of Her Sex".

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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, 2009.
115
This name had been used...
Intertextuality and Influence Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Constantia Grierson
Other poems in the manuscript include advice to young women (a topic CG also pursued in a prose piece), expressions of female aspiration and solidarity and of fervent religious belief (for instance in a prayer-poem...
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 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, 1731, p. iv - lxxx.
xii-xiii
Norris advised her on her study of French, and on not taking time from her serious...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Elstob
She later told Anne Dewes that she blamed herself for having neglected several overtures of acquaintance, especially the one which Lady Betty Hastings made through the intermediary of Mary Astell while William Elstob was still...
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 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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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
It was dedicated to Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin , now settled in England (who had been, like Behn's former dedicatee Nell Gwyn, a mistress...

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