Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Héloïse
-
Standard Name: Héloïse
Birth Name: Héloïse
Used Form: Heloise
Used Form: Eloisa
Héloïse
was a woman of high intellectual ability who strove by several different means to reach beyond what twelfth-century convention allowed her. The texts of some letters addressed to her one-time lover on the topic of the conventual life for women, as well as at least one which warmly recalls their former love, have come down to posterity.
EWW
set out with conservative views on the Woman Question, though her early experience on a western farm meant that she took it for granted that women would be active and self-reliant. Her gender...
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
Helen Waddell
published a historical novel entitled Peter Abelard (in which, naturally, Heloise
is also an important figure).
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Helen Waddell
Abelard figured in her imagination as her ideal man, and on at least one occasion she dreamed that she herself was Heloise
(as an abbess and an elderly woman after Abelard's death).
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable.
Peter Abelard, set in Paris and Brittany, runs from June 1116 to November 1122. It is fully novelistic in style, opening with a passage in which Abelard, as a thirty-six-year-old lecturer, savours his...
Anthologization
Catharine Trotter
The ascription has been subject to some question, since the formerly accepted birthdate for CT
made her only fourteen at the time; the date established by more recent scholarship makes her approaching twenty.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The volume,...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Tollet
ET
's reputation persisted for some time after her death. Mary Scott
praised her highly in The Female Advocate, 1774. John Duncombe
(though her posthumous publication was too late for inclusion in his Feminiad...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Ann Thicknesse
AT
makes it clear she is no proto-feminist: If women are thought to possess minds less capable of solid reflection than men, they owe this conjecture entirely to their own vanity, and erroneous method of...
Publishing
Anna Seward
AS
compiled a 7-page booklet, Memoirs of Abelard
and Eloisa, which was issued at Newcastle with other Abelard and Eloisa material.
The British Library Catalogue lists AS
's contribution as part of a larger work.
Seward, Anna et al. “Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Eloisa, translated by. John Hughes and John Hughes, J. Mitchell.
title-page
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Alexander Pope
AP
published his one-volume Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, including the previously unpublished epistle Eloisa
to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.
Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Editor Butt, John, Methuen; Yale University Press.
2: 312
Textual Features
Alexander Pope
These two poems celebrate passionate love and loss experienced by fictional women, victimised by an unfeeling world; the first is a tour de force of ventriloquism, as Pope persuasively adopts a female voice. Pope's Eloisa...
Family and Intimate relationships
Petrarch
The famous beloved, Laura, whom he celebrates in his poetry, has not been identified. He says that he first saw her in a church in Avignon during Holy Week, 1327;
In her reviewing capacity she was able to comment on several texts central to the European tradition of women's writing. She called Marie de Lafayette
's La Princesse de Cleves (re-issued as part of an...
Textual Production
Constantia Grierson
A long untitled poem in CG
's manuscript album beginning Ah Theodosius could mankind but see expresses the love of Constantia for Theodosius, using a literary veil drawn from the story of lovers of these...
Textual Production
Hélène Gingold
HG
published the five-act tragedy Abelard
and Heloise.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
January 1761: Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his epistolary...
Writing climate item
January 1761
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
published his epistolarynovelJulie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse; it was translated into English the same year by William Kenrick
.
Texts
Abelard, Peter, and Héloïse. “Editorial Materials”. The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse, translated by. Betty Radice, Penguin, 1974.
Abelard, Peter, and Héloïse. Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Translator Hughes, John, J. Watts, 1713.
Seward, Anna et al. “Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Eloisa, translated by. John Hughes and John Hughes, J. Mitchell, 1805.
Abelard, Peter et al. Petri Abaelardi, Sancti Gildasii in Britannia abbatis, et Heloisae coniugis eius, quae postmodum prima coenobii paraclitensis abbatissa fuit, Opera. Editor Du Chesne, André, Nicolai Buon, 1616.
