Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Astell
-
Standard Name: Astell, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Astell
Pseudonym: A Lover of Her Sex
Pseudonym: The Author of the Proposal to the Ladies
Pseudonym: The Reflector
Pseudonym: Tom Single
Pseudonym: A very Moderate Person and Dutiful Subject of the
Queen
Pseudonym: A Daughter of the Church of England
Pseudonym: Mr Wotton
Best known as a feminist theorist and polemicist, MA
is also a fine poet and an energetic and funny controversialist on the political affairs of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. A High Anglican and High Tory in politics, she was nevertheless outspokenly radical about matters concerning gender. Her regular publisher, Rich or Richard Wilkin
, was known for his piety.
The diary's first volume opens with a preface which expresses conventional modesty bluntly, without the customary effort at elegance or grace: Books generally begin with a Preface which draws in the Reader to go on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sophia Lee
The plot in some ways echoes that of Richardson
's Pamela. Cecilia Rivers, orphan daughter of a poor and saintly clergyman, comes down in the world and has to earn her living as a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Drake
Her remark that English women are born slaves,
Drake, Judith. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. A. Roper, E. Wilkinson, and R. Clavel, 1696, http://U of A, Special Collections.
22
like black plantation labourers, may have given the phrase to Mary Astell
, whose use of it is famous.
Intertextuality and Influence
Catharine Macaulay
The letters are addressed to Hortensia (the name of a Roman matron who acted against gender convention by speaking publicly in the Forum against a proposed tax on women).
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
115
This name had been used...
Intertextuality and Influence
May Drummond
Thomas Story
said that at the beginning of her preaching career MD
had a Turn of Expression . . . very taking to most Hearers, especially the more polite sort of both Sexes,
Story, Thomas. The Life of Thomas Story. Isaac Thompson, 1747.
720
and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Masters
A few of the letters discuss female friendship and feminist opinion, as if seeking to raise the consciousness of the recipient. Some in this category occur at random among other letters. Most treat topics of...
Literary responses
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The praise by Astell
, and by an anonymous poet who also attached a compliment to the manuscript, shows a recognition that this was a landmark text in women's writing. A considerable critical literature has...
Literary responses
Catharine Trotter
Nineteenth-century literary historians—Charles Dibdin
, John Doran
, Jane Williams
—tended, though from different viewpoints, to subordinate her writings to her supposed personal characteristics.
Clark, Constance. Three Augustan Women Playwrights. Peter Lang, 1986.
63
More disappointingly, a feminist literary historian of the early...
Literary responses
Delarivier Manley
By linking her with Astell
(as author of Bart'lemy Fair) he made it clear that the issue was her gender at least as much as her politics. She, meanwhile, maintained that she produced the...
Literary Setting
Sarah Butler
Butler makes of this history a novel ostensibly in ten parts, though the plot continues through them as a single sustained narrative. They are titled The Captivated Monarch, The Banish'd Prince (both titles to...
Occupation
William Law
On her husband's death, Elizabeth Hutcheson
, former friend of Mary Astell
, moved with Hester Gibbon
to join WL
in philosophic retirement at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, where they became local benefactors.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
politics
Sarah Scott
They believed that women could think and write in freedom only outside relationships with men. Although Mary Astell
's writing influenced them, they insisted that women must be involved in society and not withdraw into...
politics
Harriet Martineau
HM
revelled in her single state and proclaimed herself probably the happiest single woman in England.
In keeping with the general interest among earlier Victorian feminists in the potential of sisterhoods, an article...
Author summary
Fidelia
This symbolic name indicating faithfulness (which was also adopted for themselves by Mary Astell
, Jane Barker
, and the American writers Sarah Gill
, Hannah Griffitts
and Sukey Vickery
, as well as for...
