Sarah Prescott

Women and poetry, 1660-1750

The specially commissioned essays in Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 address the multiplicity of female poetic practice and the public image of the woman poet between the Restoration and mid-eighteenth century. The volume includes biographically informative accounts of individual poets alongside detailed essays that discuss the different contexts and poetic traditions shaping womens poetry in this key period in literary history. Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 draws together a wealth of recent scholarship from a strong cast of contributors (including Germaine Greer) into one accessible volume aimed at both students and specialist readers.

The debt to pleasure: eliza haywood's love in excess and women's fiction of the 1720s

Abstract The fiction of Eliza Haywood, Penelope Aubin and Elizabeth Singer Rowe has been seen to represent two very different ways of writing novels in the 1720s: the amatory and the pious. The literary significance of these writers has also been described in terms of two traditions of womens writing: the scandalous and the virtuous. This article suggests that these conventional dichotomies are unsettled by a comparative reading ofLove in Excessalongside the fiction of Aubin and Rowe. A parallel reading of the work of these writers, in fact, reveals very close textual similarities which suggest that women writers of the 1720s were more indebted to Haywood than has hitherto been acknowledged. The article contends that Haywood should occupy a more central position in the history of early eighteenth-century literary culture and posits a conception of authorial influence between women as a process of dialogue and recognition rather than dismissal and rejection.

The Cambrian Muse: Welsh Identity and Hanoverian Loyalty in the Poems of Jane Brereton (1685-1740)

This article examines the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet Jane Brereton in the context of recent critical interest in constructions of British national identity in the eighteenth century. It is argued that Breretons staunch commitment to the Hanoverian monarchs and the Anglo-British center does not so much detract from her expression of Welsh identity in her poetry, but rather refracts this identity through the lens of British solidarity. In conclusion, it is suggested that, in keeping with other Anglo-Welsh writers of her class and language group, Breretons national identity is informed by ideas of British unity rather than Welsh independence.

Cambrian Bards and Antiquarian Romantics: Anglophone Women Poets from Eighteenth-Century Wales

ABSTRACT Despite the fact that the recuperation of the ancient Welsh past at the hands of eighteenth-century “Celticists” was primarily a masculine endeavour, women poets of the time nevertheless engaged with this phenomenon on a number of intriguing levels. This essay explores a range of anglophone Welsh women poets, from the seventeenth-century Cardigan-based Katherine Philips to the Romantic writer Mary Robinson, in order to demonstrate womens engagement with antiquarian and national concerns in their own poetic productions. Through an analysis of their Wales-related poetry, which takes in a number of influences—from local knowledge of the Welsh landscape, of ancient British bardic verse, classical precedent and Welsh music, as well as the eighteenth-century “vogue” for imitating (or forging) the poetry of ancient cultures—the essay argues that it is possible to trace an identifiably female response to the periods literary interest in the ancient Celtic world.

Archipelagic Literary History: Eighteenth-Century Poetry from Ireland, Scotland and Wales

Since the mid-1980s, the study of eighteenth-century women writers has transformed the landscape of literary studies. Feminist literary history has seemingly reached a moment of maturity where it can reflect upon its own practice and move beyond the initial stages of recovery and/or discovery of writers and texts. In addition, the emphasis on the novel as the key genre for demonstrating women’s engagement in literary culture has shifted to include a range of important scholarship on a wide variety of genres and forms. Nevertheless, it remains the case that studies of eighteenth-century women’s writing do not often take into account the significance of geographical location, national identity and linguistic choice for women’s writing practice and production. British women’s literary history in particular is mostly framed by an Anglo-centric context where ‘Britain’ is often used as a synonym for ‘England’. In consequence, writers from Ireland, Scotland and especially Wales are either absorbed by an often unconscious Anglo-British bias or treated separately with regard to their national linguistic and literary traditions. The development of ‘archipelagic’ or ‘four nations’ criticism has started to devolve attention to locations and writers previously deemed geographically and significantly marginal.1 Nevertheless, in a reflection of the dominance of the novel in earlier studies of women’s literary history, ‘four nations’ criticism has similarly focused on fiction (especially the historical or national tale), as the key genre for uncovering national allegiance in the eighteenth century and Romantic period.2 However, the British novel was of course resolutely Anglophone in the eighteenth century. Therefore, women who composed in the Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh) are by definition excluded from discussion as their primary productions were poetic.

Women travellers in Wales: Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Morgan and Elizabeth Isabella Spence

This article explores examples of published and unpublished works by three women writers (Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Morgan and Elizabeth Isabella Spence) which encompass travels and tours in north and south Wales as well as spanning what might be termed pre-Romantic and Romantic eras of travel writing from the mid-1770s to the early 1800s. These accounts span a significant period in the history of travel writing and of shifting perceptions of Wales from a backward and uncivilised land to a place venerated for its ancient bardic culture and sublime landscapes. The present essay thus attempts to illustrate and explore not only the individual and varied modes of travel writing adopted by women writers but also the changes in womens representations of Wales in this key historical period, from a relatively obscure destination in the 1770s to a recognisable tourist attraction by 1809.

Provincial Networks, Dissenting Connections and Noble Friends

’Twas only out of regard to Mr. Rowe, that with his society she was willing to bear London during the winter season; and as soon after his decease as her affairs would permit, she indulged her unconquerable inclinations to solitude, by returning to Frome in Somersetshire, in the neighbourhood of which place the greater part of her estate lay. When she forsook the town, she determined to return to it no more, but to conceal the remainder of her life in absolute retirement.1

Authorship for Women: Careers and Contexts

Why did women choose a literary career in this period and what effect did factors such as economic necessity and place have on the career paths and publication patterns they chose to follow? This chapter provides some broad categories for thinking about how material circumstances and geographical location affected the careers of women writers. Although one of my overall aims in this study is to contest the assumption that the professional ‘Grub Street’ writer was the dominant model for women writers at this time, part of my project here is to reassess those writers whose literary careers were indeed shaped by economic pressures. Despite the popular image of the professional woman writer as a literary prostitute, many authors conventionally known for their morality, such as Jane Barker and Penelope Aubin, were as concerned to make their writing pay as their more ‘scandalous’ counterparts, such as Eliza Haywood. Therefore, although literary professionalism for women at this time was undoubtedly a difficult route to follow, this is not to say that all women who earned money for their writing were the objects of scorn and derision.

Introduction: From Punk to Poetess

This volume of scholarly critical essays is concerned with female poetic practice in an important transitional period of women’s literary history From the post-Restoration to mid-eighteenth century we witness a major shift in that practice from having been predominantly coterie, to the emergence of the professional woman poet within an expansive print culture. Such a transition required women poets to indulge in complex acts of self-fashioning as they embraced, negotiated or contested a range of stereotypes from the antifeminist label of immoral ‘punk’ to the domesticated ideal of virtuous ‘poetess’. Women’s poetic practice in the early modern period has until very recently remained largely invisible to literary historians and the critical establishment. A now mature academic feminist literary historiographical project is actively engaged in recovering and evaluating a vast body of hitherto neglected women’s poetry. Groundbreaking anthologies like Kissing the Rod (1988), edited by Germaine Greer et al., and Roger Lonsdale’s pioneering Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989) alerted many of us to long-suspected riches and importantly served to make a selection of this material available for undergraduate and post-graduate teaching purposes. A glaring lack of scholarly editions of specific women poets has begun to be rectified, notably by the Women Writers Project based at Brown University, Providence.

Introduction: Relocating Women’s Literary History

This study offers a challenge to existing models of women’s literary history by investigating a variety of different contexts in which women wrote and published from the 1690s to the 1740s. One of my main aims is to revise the urban, professional and fiction-oriented model that has so often been used to describe early eighteenth-century women writers.1 Instead of focusing exclusively on novelists, the present study includes analysis of writers in both poetry and fiction. Furthermore, rather than concentrating solely on the impact of a professional print culture on women’s writing practices, I suggest that multiple contexts for writing and publication coexisted at this time. Throughout this study, I relocate women’s relation to literary culture in two ways. First, I complicate the way in which we can understand the authorial modes women practised at this time by expanding the current critical templates we have at our disposal. I suggest that factors such as political allegiance and religious belief as well as individual economic circumstances and class positions all affected women’s relation to their authorial identities and their publication practices. In this respect I am relocating women’s literary history in a conceptual sense by rethinking and expanding the theoretical categories used to describe women’s relation to literary culture and authorship.