Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catharine Macaulay
-
Standard Name: Macaulay, Catharine
Birth Name: Catharine Sawbridge
Married Name: Catharine Macaulay
Married Name: Catharine Graham
Self-constructed Name: Catharine Macaulay Graham
Used Form: Mrs Macauly
CM
is best known as a radical historian (the only historian of England from a republican point of view for almost two centuries after she wrote). The eight volumes of her History of England took her another twenty years of work from the publication of the first volume in 1763, and ran to 3,483 quarto pages.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press, 1992.
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She also wrote memorable pamphlets on political and other topics, and treatises on theology and gender politics.
"Catharine Macaulay" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Catharine_Macaulay_%28n%C3%A9e_Sawbridge%29_by_Robert_Edge_Pine.jpg/832px-Catharine_Macaulay_%28n%C3%A9e_Sawbridge%29_by_Robert_Edge_Pine.jpg.
The day chosen was Friday, later switched to Thursday. The meetings took place in winter, the fashionable season at Bath, and upper-class visitors were eager to attend. Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
visited during the first...
politics
Clara Reeve
CR
said that her father was an old Whig, and it appears that her own politics were of the same stamp. She favoured social reforms like improved education for women, and welcomed the early...
Publishing
Mary Wollstonecraft
It was dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand
, a supporter of the Revolution and the reputed lover of Germaine de Staël
. She produced a second, revised edition by the end of the year...
Publishing
Elizabeth Carter
The book had gone to press in June 1757.
Feminist Companion Archive.
The original press run of 1,018 copies had to be supplemented with a further 250. First of several more editions was the Dublin one of the...
Reception
Ann Jebb
George Dyer
warmly praised AJ
in his poem On Liberty, which appeared in his Poems of 1792. Since he also praised Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Charlotte Smith
,...
Reception
Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John
wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
qtd. in
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
Over the next few years she reviewed many important new books as well as a good deal which she herself regarded as trash. Both her range of coverage and the prominence of her contributions increased...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Textual Features
Mercy Otis Warren
Unlike the other major, early historians of the American Revolution, MOW
wrote from the viewpoint of the side that lost the peace: those who would have liked the new nation to be somewhat closer to...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Frances Brooke
Brooke's advertisement to volume 3 says she gave up her plan for an essay on the writing of history, and settled instead on using notes to demonstrate how this work is, as all history ought...
Textual Features
Hannah More
HM
writes her Hints in full political consciousness of the likelihood that she is trying to shape a future ruler. Her claim to have remained uninfluenced by Wollstonecraft
or Catharine Macaulay
(whom she called patriotic...
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
For this her great support and encouragement was her brother
(as he, rather than her husband
, continued to be for her later publications). After he left home to pursue his studies, she sent him...
Timeline
1805: George Nicholson compiled and published at...
Women writers item
1805
George Nicholson
compiled and published at Poughnill near Ludlow in ShropshireThe Advocate and Friend of Woman, an anthology of excerpts.
Women Writers of the (long) English Regency. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts, 2009.