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.
An Advertisement claims that The Recess is a version, in modernised English, of a manuscript memoir from the reign of Elizabeth I
. It breaks new ground for the English novel in various ways: it...
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Elizabeth Thomas
This collection contains the harvest of Thomas's poetic career. Her Muse, she says, is unfashionably incapable of dealing with love or obscenity: this shows clearly that her original poetic context was a Restoration one.
Thomas, Elizabeth, 1675 - 1731. Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects. Thomas Combes, 1722.
50-1
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Elizabeth Thomas
These letters provide a vivid picture of ET's life: her cultured friends, her alertness to read and comment on new and old books (she and Gwinnett discuss Locke
, Malebranche
, Norris
, Astell
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Elizabeth Elstob
EE
's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell
, Anne Bacon
, Katherine Chidley
(as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
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Sarah Chapone
SC
used letters to introduce John Wesley
to the works of Mary Astell
—just as, later, she used letters to raise the consciousness of George Ballard
.
Textual Features
Mrs Ross
Among a large cast, Mrs Charlton (who has a protegee, the daughter of her early love, who is intensely but secretly unhappy) and Mrs Finch are old maids and glad to be so. Althea (youngest...
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Sarah Chapone
SC
's attitude to this very public fallen woman is unusual and carefully analysed. The situation recalls that of Mary Astell
writing about Hortense Mancini
in Reflections on Marriage.
Glover, Susan Paterson, and Sarah Chapone. “Introduction”. The Hardships of the English Laws, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1-16.
7
As a most abused...
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Clara Reeve
This is an extension of The School for Widows: it argues for reform (including improved education for women) as a preventative for revolution. Its ideas, however, may sound reactionary, and its version of gender-roles...
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Anne Finch
AF
wrote a religious poem for the occasion, addressed to her friend Lady Catherine Jones
(who was also a friend of Mary Astell
).
Finch, Anne. The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. Editors McGovern, Barbara and Charles H. Hinnant, University of Georgia Press, 1998.
126ff
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
LMWM
and Mary Astell
wrote, on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, polemical poems on the death of the fourteen-year-old bride Eleanor Bowes (née Verney
), denouncing the institution of marriage.
Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Clarendon, 1999.
240-1
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
She altered or misremembered the date she gave the final letter in her book; the corresponding actual letter could not have been written on that day. Mary Astell
added her feminist paratext, in prose and...
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Jane Lead
The Theosophical Transactions attracted much attention to JL
's existing and forthcoming publications as well as to her ideas and her circle. It also included excerpts of work by others, including Mary Astell
. It...
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Judith Drake
In the late 1990s, a bookshop offered for sale a two-leaf poem which seems to come from a longer work entitled To the Most Ingenious Mrs. — . . . Defence of Her Sex...
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Damaris Masham
The attribution to her in some quarters of Astell
's Serious Proposal (published in July 1694 as by a Lover of her Sex) may have made DM
wish to distance herself from Astell. Here...
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Damaris Masham
Boyer made the ascription in the 1705 volume of his annual series The History of the Reign of Queen Anne.
English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/.
Masham claimed in her preface to have written this work (during leisure Hours)...
