Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship

264 Pages·2012·3.133 MB·English

by  Daniel Cook, Amy Culley (eds.)

Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850
Also by Daniel Cook
THE VICTIM OF FANCY, by Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins (ed.)
JONATHAN SWIFT: Classic Critical Views (ed.)
THE LIVES OF JONATHAN SWIFT (ed.)
Also by Amy Culley
WOMEN’S COURT AND SOCIETY MEMOIRS (ed.)
Women’s Life Writing,
1700–1850
Gender, Genre and Authorship
Edited by
Daniel Cook
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of W isconsin-Madison, USA
and
Amy Culley
Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lincoln, UK
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Daniel Cook and Amy Culley 2012
Individual chapters © contributors 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-34307-8
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First published 2012 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors viii
Introduction: Gender, Genre and Authorship 1
Daniel Cook and Amy Culley
1 The Air of a Romance: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Constructs Her Life 9
Isobel Grundy
2 Barrett Writing Burney: A Life among the Footnotes 26
Catherine Delafield
3 An Authoress to Be Let: Reading Laetitia Pilkington’sMemoirs 39
Daniel Cook
4 Sociability and Life Writing: Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi 55
Felicity A. Nussbaum
5 Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney’s Life
Writing in Paris 71
Peter Sabor
6 A Model for the British Fair? French Women’s Life
Writing in Britain, 1680–1830 86
Gillian Dow
7 Autobiographical Time and the Spiritual ‘Lives’
of Early Methodist Women 103
Laura Davies
8 Writing Female Biography: Mary Hays and
the Life Writing of Religious Dissent 117
Felicity James
9 ‘Prying into the Recesses of History’: Women Writers and
the Court Memoir 133
Amy Culley
10 TheMemoirs of Harriette Wilson: A Courtesan’s Byronic
Self-Fashioning 150
Sharon M. Setzer
v
vi Contents
11 Remembering Wollstonecraft: Feminine Friendship, Female
Subjectivity and the ‘Invention’ of the Feminist Heroine 165
Mary L. Spongberg
12 Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith: Biography,
Autobiography and the Writing of Women’s Literary History 181
Jennie Batchelor
Notes 197
Select Bibliographyy 239
Index 244
Acknowledgements
This collection of essays began life humbly as a conversation between
Amy and Daniel about women’s life writing in the eighteenth century.
Soon enough it inhabited conference panels at the IABA in Sussex, the
MLA in Los Angeles, and ‘Women’s Life Writing in the Long Eighteenth
Century’ in Manchester. Paula and Ben at Palgrave offered strong
encouragement of the project through its journey into book form; it
is to them that we wish to offer our warmest gratitude. We would also
like to thank our institutional support – the universities of Keele, Bristol
and Lincoln in the UK, and the University of Wisconsin- Madison in the
US – and to the many helpful individuals contained therein; Joshua
Taft, a graduate student at U W-M adison, deserves special mention for
his masterly work on the index. We’re also thankful to Elizabeth Eger
and Clare Brant for their very insightful suggestions during the early
stages of the project and to Jennie Batchelor and Felicity James for their
invaluable comments on the Introduction. And, no less importantly,
we would like to extend our great thanks to our contributors. We hope
they, and our readers, enjoy where the conversation took us.
vii
Contributors
Jennie Batchelorr is Reader in Eighteenth- Century Studies at the
University of Kent. She is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire:
Clothing and the Body in E ighteenth-Century Literature (2005) andWomen’s
Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship, 1750–1830 (2010). In addition, she
has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender, sexual-
ity, and print and material culture in the long eighteenth century. She
is C o-series Editor, with Cora Kaplan, of a ten- volume History of British
Women’s Writingg from the medieval period to the present (2010–).
Daniel Cook teaches at the University of W isconsin- Madison. He
completed a PhD at Cambridge before taking up an AHRC Research
Fellowship on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and
then a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University
of Bristol. Daniel has published widely on eighteenth-century and
Romantic literature and biography and has edited such books as The
Lives of Jonathan Swiftt, 3 vols (2011).
Amy Culley is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln.
She is editor of volumes 1–4 of Women’s Court and Society Memoirs
(2009), has published essays and articles on women’s life writing, and is
guest editor of a special edition of the journal Life Writingg(2011). She is
currently working on a monograph on women’s life writing in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Laura Davies is a research fellow at the Centre for Christianity and
Culture, University of Oxford. Her current work explores the relation-
ship between the secular and the spiritual within eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Britain, and most particularly is concerned with the
distinctive cultures of orality and life writing of this period. Her publica-
tions include articles on Samuel Johnson, oral tradition, the rhetoric of
John Wesley, and a chapter on Methodism and literature inThe Ashgate
Research Companion to World Methodism (forthcoming).
Catherine Delafield is an independent scholar who has previously
taught at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Women’s
Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009).
viii
Contributors ix
Gillian Dow is a lecturer in English at the University of Southampton,
and responsible for the academic programme at Chawton House Library.
Her main interests are in reception and translation, and in particular in
c ross-channel exchanges in women’s writing of the long eighteenth
century. She has published/has in press several essays and edited collec-
tions in this area. She is a founding member of a European network of
scholars examining women’s literary history Europe-w ide.
Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada,
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was until 2003 Henry Marshall
Tory Professor in that university’s Department of English. She is author
of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986), Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenmentt (1999) and (with Virginia Blain
and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English:
Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Presentt(1990). She has edited a
number of texts by Montagu, and Secresyy (1795), by Eliza Fenwick. She is a
Trustee of Chawton House Library, and co-editor (with Susan Brown and
Patricia Clements) of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the
Beginnings to the Presentt, published online by subscription by Cambridge
University Press in 2006 and still regularly expanded and updated.
Felicity James is a lecturer in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century lit-
erature at the University of Leicester. Her publications include Charles
Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (2008)
and a c o- edited collection of essays,Religious Dissent and the A ikin- Circle,
c.1740s to c.1860s (2011). She is currently writing a monograph on
Dissenting traditions of life writing.
Felicity A. Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA,
has written most recently Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the
E ighteenth-Century British Theaterr (2010). Past president of the American
Society for E ighteenth- Century Studies, she has published a number
of books on e ighteenth-c entury literature and gender, including The
Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in E ighteenth-Century England
(1989), which was co- recipient of the Louis Gottschalk Prize.
Peter Saborr is Professor of English at McGill University, where he also
holds the Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth- Century Studies and is
Director of the Burney Centre. He has editedThe Cambridge Companion
to Frances Burneyy and c o- edited her Complete Plays and two of her
novels, Cecilia and The Wanderer. He is the general editor of Burney’s