Anne K. Mellor

Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780–1830

Acknowledgments Introduction: Women and the Public Sphere in England, 1780-1830 1. Hannah More, Revolutionary Reformer 2. Theatre as the School of Virtue 3. Womens Political Poetry 4. Literary Criticism, Cultural Authority and The Rise of the Novel 5. The Politics of Fiction : I - Desmond : II - Persuasion Postscript: The Politics of Modernity Notes Works Cited Index

A feminist introduction to romanticism

List of Illustrations. List of Women Writers Discussed. 1 A Feminist Approach to Romantic Studies and the Case of Austen. Standard Definitions and Revisions. The Historical Period. Feminist Theory and Romantic Studies. Jane Austen, a Case Study. 2 Women and Politics: Writing Revolution. Letters and the Maternal: Political Metaphors. Revolution as a Frame of Mind. Revolutionary Writing. Maternal Nationalism and Childrena s Literature. 3 Women and the Gothic: Literature as Home Politics. Defining the Gothic. The Gothic as Domestic: Social Critique Gothics. Psychological Drama Gothics. The Romance of Real Life and the Radical Critique. 4 Women and Thought: Intellectual Critique. The Bluestocking Circle in London. Dissent and the Rights of the Home. Women and History. Literary Criticism as Art. Intellectuality and the Years of Reaction. 5 Women and Identity: Visuality in Romantic Texts. Seeing and Seen: The Writer and the Proper Lady. Display and the Specular Heroine. Tableaux Vivants, Theatrics and Burneya s The Wanderer. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

On feminist utopias

Since a gender‐free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits the equality of the sexes is inherently Utopian. Feminist Utopian writers, working within the traditional genre of science‐fiction, a genre particularly well‐suited to revolutionary theoretical discussions, have explored three types of feminist utopias: all‐female societies, biological androgyny, and genuinely egalitarian two‐sex societies. This essay examines examples of feminist utopias in each of these three paradigms to determine to what extent they are “abstract” (in Ernst Blochs terminology), ie. merely wish‐fulfillment fantasies, and to what extent “concrete” and thus viable blue‐prints for future political and social organization.

Making an exhibition of her self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and nineteenth‐century scripts of female sexuality

W what—was Mary Robinson? What can we learn from an exploration of the life and writings of this almost forgotten female author of the English Romantic period? I turn our attention to Mary Robinson because she poses what I think is a fascinating problem, both about our current intellectual constructions of subjectivity and about the ways in which women—and in particular female sexuality—were understood in Europe between 1780 and 1830. The career of Mary Robinson forces us to confront the question: How could the story of female sexuality in the early nineteenth century be told? This question implies two prior questions. First, who got to tell the story? The person who performed the sexual act? Or the people who observed the act, from near or afar? Whose voice carried more credibility, the autobiographers or the biographers? And secondly, how was the story of female sexuality told? What generic conventions or narrative plots were available in the historical culture of nineteenth-century England to make a particular story of female sexuality both comprehensible and credible? Let me begin with a few uncontested historical facts concerning Mary Darby Robinson, celebrated actress, writer, autobiographer, and the first lover of the Prince of Wales and future King of England, George IV. Mary Darby was born on November 27, 1758, in Bristol, the daughter of Mary Seys, a respectable Welsh woman, and John Darby, an adventurous and financially successful American merchant-seaman. When Mary was eleven, John Darby left his

Embodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Woman Writer

When can the term “cosmopolitan” legitimately be applied to political theories or literary texts? After surveying recent theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism in the fields of political science, philosophy and literary studies, this essay argues for a more restrictive definition of cosmopolitanism, one that found expression in the writings of Romantic‐era British women. To explore the theoretical implications of what I am calling an “embodied cosmopolitanism,” I turn to a detailed analysis of Marianna Starkes play, The Widow of Malabar. Together with Elizabeth Inchbalds Such Things Are, Hannah Cowleys A Day in Turkey, and Charlotte Smiths late novels, these texts suggest provocative new ways to give substance to Kants demand for global “cosmopolitan rights.”

Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril.

(2001). Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-28.

The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Poetry, 1780–1830

The most important recent criticism of poetry written by women in England during the Romantic period has tended to represent that poetry as the production of what critics have concurred in calling ‘the poetess’. I am thinking especially of the perceptive analyses of the poetry of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon provided by Isobel Armstrong in her chapter on ’Precursors’ in Victorian Poetry (1993), by Angela Leighton in her chapters on Hemans and L.E.L. in Victorian Women Poets (1992), by Cheryl Walker in her chapter on ’The Poetess at Large’ in The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), by Glennis Stephenson in her study of the career of Letitia Landon, Letitia Landon — The Woman behind L.E.L. (1995), as well as of my own attempt to locate the poetry of Hemans and Landon within the Burkean category of the ’beautiful’ in my Romanticism and Gender (1993). Rightly recognizing that the Victorian literary establishment defined Hemans, Landon and their female peers as ’poetesses’, distinctly different from the male ’poet’, these critics have explored and acutely defined the specific literary conventions which governed the productions of these poetesses and helped to construct a feminine ’music of their own’. These conventions encompassed, as Armstrong and others have shown, the adoption of the mask of the improvisatrice.

Blake, the Apocalypse and Romantic Women Writers

As Morton D. Paley trenchantly reminded us in The Apocalyptic Sublime in 1986, apocalyptic subjects were “a permanent and distinctive aspect of Blake’s imagination—a lifelong engagement with the idea of divine revelation penetrating history and bringing it toward a Day of Wrath and Last Judgement.” I need not rehearse Blake’s commitment to a vision of the future that entailed a sudden and radical break with the past. That break could happen either at the level of the individual who comes to perceive his or her absorption into the human form divine, or at the level of an entire social group that is finally empowered, as Blake prophesies at the end of his epic poem Jerusalem, to converse together … in Visionary forms dramatic which bright Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age [;] (Jerusalem 98, 28–33; Erdman, p. 257)

Were Women Writers "Romantics"?

Ever since Joan Kelly Gadoll’s paradigm-challenging essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” appeared in 1977, feminist historians and literary critics have wondered whether the current academic constructions of literary or historical periods are still valid.1 What happens when we track the history of women’s writing independently from that of canonical writing? Do the same epistemic, conceptual, or even roughly historical divisions—medieval; Renaissance/early modern; Restoration/seventeenth century; neoclassical/eighteenth century; Romanticism/Victorian/nineteenth century; modern/postmodern/ twentieth century—make any sense for British women’s writing? Taking the literature I know best, eighteenthand nineteenthcentury British women’s writing, I would argue that our literary periodizations for this era—neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian—are conceptually useless for, perhaps even counterproductive in, illuminating women’s literary history. Insofar as they imply significant thematic epistemological divisions or historical shifts, these labels hinder a clearer, more accurate account of how women’s writing developed between 1700 and 1900. Following the lead of Margaret J. M. Ezell, we must “rewrite” women’s literary history.2 Women’s writing entered the public print culture in England in the early modern period under two pressures, the first religious, the

Making a “monster”

Mary Shelleys waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, gave birth to one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. Frankenstein can claim the status of a myth so profoundly resonant in its implications that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. The condemners of genetically modified meats and vegetables now refer to them as “Frankenfoods,” and the debates concerning the morality of cloning or stem cell engineering constantly invoke the cautionary example of Frankensteins monster. Nor is the monster-myth cited only in regard to the biological sciences; critics of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons alike often make use of this monitory figure. Of course, both the media and the average person in the street have frequently and mistakenly assigned the name of Frankenstein not to the maker of the monster but to his creature. But as we shall see, this “mistake” actually derives from a crucial intuition about the relationship between them. Frankenstein is our cultures most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern “scientific” man, of the dangers inherent in scientific research, and of the horrifying but predictable consequences of an uncontrolled technological exploitation of nature and the female.