Jennie E Batchelor

British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

her acceptance of Colonial Joseph Bampfield’s duplicitous courtship, she implies her innocence by juxtaposition because midway into her account of Bampfield’s suit, she interrupts the story with another anecdote about deceit, in which her behavior is above reproach (p. 122). Although careful readings like these are illuminating, many of the texts are incomplete and thus frustrate any effort to locate meaning solely within the text itself. Material is missing, for example, from the beginning, end, and two “highly sensitive points in the narrative” in Halkett’s text (p. 119). In addition, what does remain of them is often frustratingly reticent. As a result, conclusions are difficult. Seelig concludes by tracing a movement in the sequence of narratives from fact to fiction, from a weaker to “a stronger sense of self” (p. 12), and toward a more central role for the writer in her text. However, the book does not provide the historical or literary context a reader needs to know whether this movement reveals something more than Seelig’s own choice among and sequencing of texts. Does the movement from fact to fiction say something about historical change? It is hard to tell because the sequence of texts is not strictly chronological. Does it reveal something about gender? It is hard to tell because no autobiographies by men are considered, although comparison with John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, would have been fascinating. Most important in a book so rightly focused on notions of generic fluidity, it is not clear that the same movement would be visible had other autobiographical genres been included by adding, for example, Isabella Whitney and Martha Moulsworth (verse), Elizabeth Cary (drama), Mary Wroth (romance), and Dorothy Osborne (letters). Discussions of individual texts in Seelig’s book offer important contributions to the study of early modern women’s autobiography, but more information is needed to support its generalizations about the field.

INFLUENCE, INTERTEXTUALITY AND AGENCY: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS AND THE POLITICS OF REMEMBERING

The preface to Charlotte Smith’s final novel, The Young Philosopher (1798), opens by recalling ‘‘a work written by Mrs. Sarah Fielding, and now out of print, called ‘The Art of Tormenting’’’ (1753). Smith then proceeds to quote, or rather to misquote, from a fable appended to the earlier work (which is by Jane Collier, not Fielding), in which a society of animals discourses on suffering and determines that the lamb has the most authority to speak upon the subject as the most afflicted creature. Seasoned readers of Smith’s fiction would not have been surprised by her subsequent declaration that, by analogy, she was the best ‘‘qualified’’ writer ‘‘to delineate’’ the ‘‘evils arising from oppression’’ and thus to have authored the work at hand. However, this is not, it appears, the novel that Smith had originally conceived. The preface explains that The Young Philosopher ‘‘differed materially’’ from its ‘‘original plan’’. Why the novel’s direction had changed course was inconsequential, Smith claimed, but fearing a resurgence of the accusations of ‘‘plagiarism’’ that had plagued her early career, and aware of the plot similarities between sections of her novel, in which the heroine is incarcerated in a madhouse, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (written in 1797, but posthumously published in 1798), Smith assured her ‘‘Critics’’ that she had not read Wollstonecraft’s text before composing her own. Had she done so, she continued, she would not have ‘‘blushed to borrow’’ from a writer so ‘‘honoured’’; she would have ‘‘acknowledged it’’. Providing further evidence for Stuart Curran’s claim that Smith was ‘‘intensely’’ ‘‘engaged with the literary world she inherited, as well as the one in which she lived’’, The Young Philosopher’s preface locates the novel, and establishes its author’s agency, in terms of a history of women’s writing

Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography, Autobiography and the Writing of Women’s Literary History

The nature of the relationship between an author’s life, her works and the scholarship that surrounds them is one that has interested and vexed historians of women’s writing since at least the early eighteenth century when female biographies emerged as a popular textual form. The growth in the market for memoirs or dictionaries of illustrious and learned women over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a double-edged sword for women writers.1 At their best, female biographies then as now could recover the lives and revive interest in the works of unjustly neglected or forgotten figures. To ‘preserv[e] from oblivion’ the lives and accomplishments of learned women was, for example, the professed aim and one of the lasting achievements of George Ballard’s influential Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1752).2 More than two centuries before the feminist recovery project began in earnest, Ballard expressed incredulity that so ‘very many ingenious women of this nation … are not only unknown to the public in general, but have been passed by in silence by our greatest biographers’, especially when their lives ‘deserve[d]’ their readers’ ‘imitation’ and afforded ‘no inconsiderable entertainment’.3 Ruth Perry has described Ballard’s Memoirs as a ‘landmark [text] in the history of feminism’, but it was the next generation of female biographies that more fully realized the political implications of his project.4

‘Be but a Little Deaf and Blind … and Happiness You’ll Surely Find’: Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Magazines for Women

This chapter refocuses common perceptions of eighteenth-century marriage through the lens of eighteenth-century women’s magazines. It demonstrates that the miscellanies’ dialogic character produced a view of married life both richer and more complex than that found in any other textual form in the period. Working against conventional scholarship that positions titles such as The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) as conduct books by another name, this chapter instead suggests that magazines’ interactive formats ensures that their concerns were not easily reducible to particular agendas or conventional wisdoms. Early women’s magazines present the bourgeois domestic ideal with which they have so long been erroneously associated with marked scepticism and enjoin their readers to navigate its myriad challenges and grim realities with pragmatism, imagination and wit.

Anon, Pseud and ‘By a Lady’: The Spectre of Anonymity in Women’s Literary History

So wrote Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One’s Own (1929) encapsulated the feminist recovery project’s determination to recuperate the lost voices, words and lives of past women writers. Yet even as A Room of One’s Own dares its readers to imagine a matriarchal textual genealogy to rival its canonical, male-dominated counterpart, it resists the temptation it puts before them. In part, the difficulty of such a project lies in Anon’s intractability. It may be ‘true’ that she was ‘often a woman’, but equally, it ‘may be false’. Where she has been firmly identified, Woolf unearths merely an unholy ‘relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women’. In the examples of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and George Sand, all of whom famously adopted male pseudonyms, she finds women who capitulated to the notion ‘that publicity in women is detestable’.2 Nonetheless, Woolf recognized Anon’s value both for women writers and for women’s literary history. Thus, the bifurcated objective of A Room of One’s Own is not simply to give Anon a name, but to do so while attempting to preserve the liberating potential of her outsider status. As Jane Goldman reminds us, Anon’s ‘legacy’ for Woolf, as articulated in this work at least, lies in its refusal of the ‘model of authorial subjectivity’—that is, the author as ‘individual, singular, […] absolute’ and male—‘constructed in patriarchy’.3

Introduction: Feminisms and Futures: Women’s Writing 1660–1830

Although this collection of essays is inspired by Chawton House Library’s tenth anniversary conference, this book is not a conference proceedings. Indeed, and rather fittingly, the essays that follow emerged, like the field that is their subject, on the periphery of the main stage (which, in this case, was a marquee on the south lawn at Chawton House Library). They originated in chats in corridors and over coffee, which were followed up by conversations in other locations, at other conferences, by email and by telephone. The resulting contributions to this collection reflect on the simultaneously exciting yet disquieting feeling many of us shared in our recognition that the conversation we could and were having about eighteenth-century women’s writing in 2013 was very different from that orchestrated by its precursor event to mark Chawton House Library’s opening in 2003.

‘[T]o strike a little out of a road already so much beaten’: Gender, Genre, and the Mid-Century Novel

When Frances Burney published Evelina (1778), she famously situated her foray into the ‘republic of letters’ in relation to the careers of an impressive list of male literary forebears.1 ‘[E]nlightened’ by Samuel Johnson’s ‘knowledge’, ‘charmed’ by Jean -Jacques Rousseau, ‘softened’ by Samuel Richardson, and ‘exhilarated’ by Henry Fielding’s ‘wit’ and Tobias Smollett’s ‘humour’, Burney declared that she ‘presume[d] not to attempt pursuing the same ground’ that these eminent figures had ‘tracked’, for ‘imitation’ in ‘books’ could not ‘be shunned too sedulously’ (pp. 9, 8). Her decision partially to depart from the example of her august predecessors was not so much motivated by a lack of confidence in her abilities, however, as it was urged by her concern for the novel’s past and its future. In their efforts to establish the genre as a legitimate literary form, Burney argued, the novel’s most eloquent practitioners had unwittingly orchestrated its demise. By the late 1770s, fiction was no longer novel and rarely displayed the hallmarks of innovation that had once characterized its appeal. In developing alternative modes of story-telling and characterization to those deployed in older prose forms such as romance, novelists including Fielding, Johnson, and Richardson had closed off others. Thus, although these writers had ‘cleared’ prose fiction of the ‘weeds’ that had formerly inhibited its growth, they had ‘also culled the flowers’ that had made it so alluring. The novel’s path may have been ‘plain’ by 1778, according to Burney, but it was also ‘barren’ (p. 9).

Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall

In this familiar passage, Sarah Scott outlines a socioeconomic and a literary vision that had been many years in the making.1 Although A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762) offers the best-known articulation of Scott’s utopian hopes for women, society, and the novel, her earlier The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754) had imagined philanthropic schemes and ideal societies that foreshadow those elaborated in her more famous work. The novel’s sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), would similarly take up the themes of charitable activism and societal remodeling explored in these earlier texts by tracing its hero’s efforts to emulate Millenium Hall’s example in a series of projects, which prove, through fictional dramatization of authorial intent, the power of exemplary narrative to produce social and political change. However, Millenium Hall remains the most utopian of Scott’s novels in its vision of a self-sustaining economy ideologically and geographically distanced from the labor and marriage markets in which heroines commonly suffer. Here, women’s work—from philanthropy, domestic oeconomy, and teaching, to spinning and carpet making—is the currency of everyday life. Carried out for the “confidence” it inspires and the “affections” it produces, rather than for material gain, the women’s labor finds its reward in the exchange of “free” and transformative “speech,” bestowed by God but ordinarily “contaminated” by the self-interested desires of commercial society.

Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’

In the above quotation, part of the long build-up to the marriage of Pamela Andrews and Mr B., Richardson’s heroine is commanded to appear before her future husband’s guests in the homespun costume she originally created to fend off his advances. Where B. once interpreted the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s ‘Dress’ as one of hypocrisy and rebellion, he now reads it as a tale of virtuous sentiment. Thus re-imagined, Pamela’s humble attire defies those who would condemn her as an ambitious upstart and proves her more than equal, in B.’s eyes at least, to the ‘greatest Ladies’ of society. But this is not the whole ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress. The centrality of clothing to Richardson’s novel has long been noted. Not only does the heroine’s inheritance of her deceased mistress’s ‘Suit ... of Cloaths’ advance the novel’s seduction plot (p. 18), but Pamela’s costume also enjoys a privileged status as a signifier of the virtue for she which she will be rewarded. Throughout the novel, dress and text appear as metaphorical equivalents - a connection forcefully established when we learn that the heroine has tacked her correspondence to her under-petticoat.2 However, the meaning of these sartorial and written texts is profoundly unstable: as B.’s revised reading of Pamela’s homespun gown suggests, this is a novel in which fabrication and truth demand constant re-evaluation.

Woman’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sarah Scott

Writing to Samuel Crisp as she made final revisions to the ill-fated Witlings (1778–80), Frances Burney strikingly aligned her literary labours with the commonly degraded employments undertaken by labouring-class women. Angered by Crisp’s suggestions that her newfound literary fame had plunged her into an unproductive round of ‘incessant and uncommon engagements’, Burney asserted the labour-intensity of both her domestic and professional employments: Caps, hats, and ribbons make, indeed no venerable appearance upon paper; — no more do eating and drinking; — yet the one can no more be worn without being made, than the other can be swallowed without being cooked; and those who can neither pay milliners, nor keep scullions, must either toil for themselves, or go capless and dinnerless.1