Book description
In the mid-eighteenth-century, the achievements of cultivated, literary
women - as poets, critics, dramatists, scholars, and polemicists - were
widely celebrated. By the beginning of the nineteenth-century, however,
they had all but disappeared. Following a chronological line from the
beginning of the eighteenth-century to the end, The Rise and Fall of the
Woman of Letters is a study of Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Elizabeth Carter,
Hester Chapone, Mrs Montagu, Anna Seward, and Joanna Baillie and other
women who took on the role of public writers in the age of rapidly
evolving print culture. Precocious, witty, learned, and confident, the
eighteenth-century woman of letters was a cultural figure who was
invited to think and speak with authority. Her voice was listened to on
equal terms with men and she derived her confidence from the approval of
a culture undergoing dramatic social and political change. By the turn
of the century, however, definitions of feminity had changed and despite
huge advancements in the publishing industry, the type of literary woman
sanctioned then and mythologised in our own times, was secretive and
troubled about daring to write, publishing mostly fiction and poetry -
internalised and 'private' forms of discourse - under pseudonyms.
Through an examination of the literary texts produced by the
'Bluestockings' and an analysis of the cultural and social changes
surrounding the production of theses materials, Clarke looks closely at
how the eighteenth-century woman of letters became such an important
part of public life and accounts for why she disappeared. Educated at
the Universities of Lancaster, London, and Kent, Norma Clarke is a
Research Fellow in the English Department, Kingston University, and an
Honorary Research Fellow in the History Department, Royal Holloway
College, University of London. She is the author of five novels for
children, numerous articles and several books, including Ambitious
Heights (1990) and, with Helen Weinstein, Spinning with the Brain
(1996).
