Women Writers in the 18 th Century

Women of literature are much more numerous of late1 than they were a few years ago. They make a class in society, they fill the public eye, and have acquired a degree of consequence and appropriate character.

Maria Edgeworth, 1795

There were thousands of British women writing novels in the second half of the 18 th

Century.2 - How can we explain this tidal wave of female novelty?

Preconditions for the Rise of the Female Novelist

Girls’ schools first began to appear in England at the end of the 17th Century.

The female novelists were greatly indebted to Samuel Richardson who, through Pamela (1741), made the novel respectable.

According to Nancy Armstrong, the English domestic novel came to replace the female conduct book around the middle of the 18th Century.

Previously private forms of writing – the letter, the diary, the conduct-book, which were seen as legitimately part of women’s province – now became public, and were incorporated into the novel.

Most women who wrote for publication in the 18th Century needed the money.

However, poetry, never a money-spinner, was increasingly seen as a preserve for men.Women could write novels, which were considered a less serious and elevated genre.

Burney earned £2000 from Evelina (1778); half a century later a governess might expect to earn £20 a year. Go figure.

Novel-writing was a means to earn money in a society in which any woman who worked jeopardized her reputation.- the domestic novel based on lessons for appropriate moral conduct was a way of

earning a living without losing one’s reputation.

Novels could be written privately and sent anonymously to publishers.The public risk – compared to writing for the stage, for instance – was much reduced.

In the 1770s and 1780s women’s rich contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of Britain was celebrated and proclaimed as superior to that of any country in Europe.

1 of late – lately, recently 2 according to Peter J. Kitson in English Literature in Context [Cambridge, 2008]

The Bluestockings

The term ‘bluestocking circle’ was originally applied to intellectual evening parties attended by both men and women.Men who supported female learning – such as Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and the actor David Garrick – were in attendance.

In fact, the term ‘bluestocking’ was first applied to a man, botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet.

The term referred to the informal way that these intellectuals dressed, in contrast to the fashion-conscious clothing of high society.

High society was addicted to card playing and dancing. The bluestockings offered the alternative of literary conversation and tea drinking.

To some extent this was the incorporation of the middle-class values of the periodical essayist and the tea and coffee houses into elite circles.

However, it was also an imitation of French salon culture, in which women played a central role in the nation’s philosophical and cultural life.- This French connection was to work against the Bluestockings during the long periods

of war with France between 1757 and 1815.

Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) assigned women a central role in the rise of civil society.The older bluestockings accepted this responsibility and laid great emphasis on their personal virtue to this end.

The period also saw the emergence of biographical dictionaries of female worthies- the first was George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have

Been Celebrated for Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752), which included 64 biographies of great women from the 14 th to the early 18th Centuries.

- tellingly, the book only included women with unblemished reputations.- 20 similar publications appeared over the next 50 years.

Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806)

Unusually, Elizabeth Carter received exactly the same education as her brothers from her clergyman father.

She excelled in ancient and modern languages as well as astronomy, mathematics and history.She published her first poem in 1734, aged 17.

She was described as “the rightful heir to Alexander Pope” for her poetry.

Her greatest work was the translation of the complete works of Epictetus from the Greek (published in 1758) which “made a great noise all over Europe.”

As a result of her famous translation, she was introduced into Elizabeth Montagu’s circle.

Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800)

Known as ‘the Queen of the Blues’ (an epithet coined by Samuel Johnson).

When she was 24 (in 1742) she married the mathematician Edward Montagu, who was much older (50).

He was only interested in his maths, so she took over the managing of his coal mines in the north of England. She used the money generated by her considerable business acumen to promote the arts.

She began her famous salon around 1750.

With the modesty that was de rigueur amongst the Bluestockings, Montagu said of herself that she was “distinguished only for making good marmalade”.

Charlotte Lennox (c. 1730-1804)

An outsider, born in Gibraltar and raised in New York, Lennox’s talents were highly valued by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson.- Johnson thought her superior to his other literary friends: Elizabeth Carter, Hannah

More and Frances Burney.

She was spurned by Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter as ‘unladylike’.

She is remembered for The Female Quixote, or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752)- highly influential on Austen’s Northanger Abbey. - Arabella’s constant errors of judgement spring from a naïve and heartfelt desire to be a

good person. - it deals with the dangers of youthful reading of romances.

Catherine Macaulay (1731-91)

Macaulay was famous for writing History of England (1763-83) - a radical Whig answer to David Hume’s influential Tory History of Great Britain

(1754-62).

She was lauded as “a female Cicero”.

Hannah More (1745-1833)

“From liberty, equality and the rights of man, Good Lord deliver us!”3

More’s anti-Paine pamphlet Village Politics (1792) was praised by the Royal Family, William Pitt (the Tory Prime Minister) and Frances Burney.

Despite her limited literary ability, More sold millions of her Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-98), improving literature for the working classes. These were over 50 moralistic short stories and ‘improving ballads’. Another 50 were written by her sisters and several other contributors. - they were so successful because clergymen, employers and landowners bought them in

bulk to distribute for free among their constituents.

More’s novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809) was hugely successful throughout the 19th Century (and is now utterly forgotten)- it established Christian philanthropy as the proper outlet for Victorian women’s

activism.

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

Known for her novel The Old Manor House (1793)- main concern is with romantic love and a proper line of succession.- however, notable for its anti-war sentiments, especially anti-British imperial conflicts.- in this novel4 she pre-empted Ann Radcliffe in explaining away apparent Gothic

elements (ghostly noises).- unusual in representing the life of servants as complex, and involved with the same

issues of precedence and status among themselves as the lives of the gentry.

Smith was initially enthusiastic for the French Revolution but had become disillusioned by 1793.

Smith’s sonnets influenced both Wordsworth and Coleridge.Wordsworth was also influenced by Smith’s interest in nature and rural life.

3 Hannah More in a letter to Horace Walpole in 17934 and the earlier Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle (1788)

Frances (‘Fanny’) Burney (1752-1840)

The first English woman novelist to achieve wide popularity and critical acclaim which has lasted beyond her own century.

In 1778 Burney published her hugely successful satirical Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance to the World.- the first version of this comic adventure was written when Fanny was just 14. - it presents a sort of social obstacle course that must be overcome on the path to marital

bliss.- a woman awkwardly manoeuvring in a world which sets great store on appearances. - it is above all a learning process.- virtue is rewarded by a slow process of learning how to recognize the correct amatory

and social signals.- women are dependants in the shadow of energetic men, and decision-makers only in

so far as they are presented with moral choices.- the growing complexities of family relations is another theme. This was taken further

by Jane Austen. - this can probably be categories as a novel of sentiment.

From a state of innocence-ignorance Evelina has to acquire experience of the world while publicly maintaining her ‘innocence’ in order to be marriageable.Evelina’s paradox provides a relatively early example of the key theme which will continue to sustain the narratives of English novels for many years long into the 19 th

Century.

Burney’s fiction is marked by an anxious conservatism and a determined upholding of patriarchal attitudes.

Burney wrote a satirical play about learned women, The Witlings (1779). However, she never had it performed because her father thought it might offend Elizabeth Montagu.

Burney’s heroines become increasingly passive and her novels increasingly dominated by social conservatism and traditionalism.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

Interestingly, Ann Radcliffe was brought up in Elizabeth Montagu’s circle.5

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was a seminal work for the Romantic movement (as acknowledged by Byron) and influenced Coleridge, Keats, Scott, Dickens, Austen Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë.

Radcliffe shows no interest in characterization but a masterly control of plot.

5 according to Sue Wiseman in ‘Women Writers and Women Readers’ in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake [Blackwell, 2000]

Conservatives vs. Unsex’d Females

In his Portraits in the Characters of Muses in the Temple of Apollo (a.k.a. The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1778), painter Richard Samuel celebrated the Bluestockings. Among other worthy creative women (including Charlotte Lennox) we can see Elizabeth Montagu and Hannah More next to Catherine Macaulay, and Elizabeth Carter next to Anna Letitia Barbauld.

This happy gathering of intellectual women was to be blown apart by the political tsunami that was the American (Declaration of Independence 17766), and French Revolutions (1789-99).

In Britain anything radical and or Frenchified began to be viewed with suspicion.

For conservatives in Britain desperate to maintain the status quo, the traditional deference between men and women took on an increasingly politicized meaning.

The true-bluestockings’ reaction was to try to fortify their virtuous credentials. - they realized that everything they had achieved could be lost if female intellect became

associated with radical destabilizing ideas.

More stridently feminist novels were beginning to appear, such as - Munster Village (1778) by Lady Mary Hamilton (1739-1816), which offers a picture

of a small feminist Utopia; or- Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) by Mary Hays, which shocked contemporaries

with its depiction of a woman pursuing a reluctant man, and in particular, with her offer to live with him outside marriage.

These were countered by more stridently anti-Jacobin, anti-atheist novels such as- A Gossip’s Story (1797) by Jane West- Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) by Elizabeth Hamilton

6 the USA was effectively independent by 1781

The Macaulay Scandal

When scandal began to appear in Macaulay’s private life – in 1778 Catherine (47) married the 21-year-old brother of her physician – her Tory opponents jumped on the opportunity to vilify her.

Elizabeth Montagu blamed Macaulay for her own downfall writing, “All this has happened from her adopting masculine opinions and masculine manners. I hate a woman’s mind in men’s clothes.”

Elizabeth Carter joined in attacking Macaulay’s flamboyant clothes (forgetting, apparently, that her own portrait had been painted as the goddess Minerva by John Fayram).

Meanwhile, in 1790 30-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft identified Macaulay as a role model and Mary Hays defended the historian from the misogynistic assault.

Wollstonecraft became the bête noire of conservatives.She was attacked by More.Horace Walpole described her as ‘a hyena in petticoats’, in contrast to the respectable More.

Interestingly, what really divided the two factions was their attitude to virtue and discretion:- the bluestocking Mary Berry was highly amused to observe that Hannah More’s

Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) agreed on all salient points, though written from completely opposite ideological positions.

- likewise, the one thing that all these women seemed to have in common was their rejection of the slave trade. Wollstonecraft and Hays attacked it because they were radicals, More repudiated it as a Christian. More argued that Africans – just like Europeans – are made in God’s image.

By 1798 the battle lines were clearly drawn.

Polwhele’s Female Angles & Devils

In 1798 the Revd. Richard Polwhele published the poem The Unsex’d Females (1798) in which he cast Wollstonecraft as Satan and Hannah More as Christ.

Wollstonecraft was accompanied by eight monstrous “unsex’d women”: o Mary Hays, o Helen Maria Williams7, o Catharine Macaulay, o Anna Letitia Barbauld8, o Anne Jebb9, o Charlotte Smith, o Mary Robinson and o Ann Yearsley10.

Against these ‘devils’ Polwhele listed a group of exemplary ‘seraphic’ God-fearing literary women, which included:

Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney and Anna Seward11.

Despite the Bluestocking’s desperate attempt to ingratiate themselves to the conservatives, women were effectively excluded from public life in the 19th Century.

Jane Austen and Mary Shelley – along with the great Victorian women writers – Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti – contributed to English literature from the private sphere, not the public one.

It was even worse in the visual arts. Angelica Kauffman (included in Samuel’s Portraits in the Characters of Muses) and Mary Moser had been founder members of the Royal Academy. No other women were accepted as full Academicians until 1936!

As Elizabeth Eger points out in Brilliant Women [2008], one of the more unsettling conclusions from all this is that there is not a simple story of progress, but rather it is one of “cycles of recognition and neglect of women’s capacity and achievement.”

7 a radical novelist, poet and translator 8 a radical poet who inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge only to be betrayed by then when they

went conservative.9 a radical writer and political reformer 10 a Bristol milkmaid who was adopted and promoted by Hannah More as a poet. Ann eventually

broke free of More’s control and set up a circulating library with the proceeds from her poetry.11 a moderate who was included in the list, presumably, because she had written a Sonnet praising

one of Polwhele’s poems

18 th -Century Literary Women’s Time Line

1752 The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox 1763-83 History of England by Catherine Macaulay1778 Evelina by Frances Burney1793 The Old Manor House by Charlotte Smith1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe1795-98 Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-98) by Hannah More 1796 Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays1809 Coelebs in Search of a Wife by Hannah More