Mothers of the nation : women's political writing in England, 1780-1830

British women writers were enormously influential in the creation of public opinion and political ideology during the years from 1780 to 1830. Anne K. Mellor demonstrates the many ways in which they attempted to shape British public policy and cultural behavior in the areas of religious and governmental reform, education, philanthropy, and patterns of consumption. Surveying all the genres of literature -- drama, poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and literary criticism -- Mellor shows how women writers promoted a new concept of the ideal woman as rationally educated, sexually self-disciplined, and, above all, virtuous. This New Woman, these writers said, was better suited to govern the nation than were its current fiscally irresponsible, lecherous, and corruptible male rulers.

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Intellectual and social historians (and not just feminists) have long believed that the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain saw an increasing separation of the male (public) and female (domestic) realms, with the result that the "public sphere" theorized by Jurgen Habermas and others to have emerged in the Enlightenment almost entirely excluded women. With energy, wit, and admirable command of her sources, Mellor (UCLA), author of distinguished books on Romanticism (English Romantic Irony, CH, Feb'81, and Romanticism and Gender, CH, Jul'93, to name just two), demonstrates that just the opposite was true: in the years around 1800, women became the primary producers and consumers of writing in Britain and vitally participated in the "discursive public sphere"--many arguing in their different ways for what Hannah More (the most popular author of the period) called "a moral revolution in the national manners and principles." Though Mellor's splendid survey of women novelists, poets, critics, playwrights, and social theorists would profit from a surer grasp of these writers' Augustan forebears and the author probably goes too far in positing a distinctive "female epistemology" for them, this bracing and important work of revision deserves a place in serious academic libraries serving both undergraduates and advanced scholars. D. L. Patey; Smith College

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: Women and the Public Sphere in England, 1780-1830

1 Hannah More, Revolutionary Reformer

2 Theatre as the School of Virtue

3 Women's Political Poetry

4 Literary Criticism, Cultural Authority and The Rise of the Novel

5 The Politics of Fiction : I - Desmond : II - Persuasion Postscript: The Politics of Modernity

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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Table des matières