Acting Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Theater (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-242
Author(s):  
Catherine Craft-Fairchild
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Novelists

Bluestocking Women and Rational Female Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty A. Schellenberg ◽  
Karen O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Women Novelists

This chapter examines views on the emerging novel developed by a loose network of mid-eighteenth-century women who came to be known as the Bluestocking circle, and the legacy of these views for succeeding women novelists. It will look at how Frances Burney's four fictional works can be seen as furthering, while revising, this legacy within an increasingly mainstream novel tradition, but also at how ongoing resistance to this generic mainstream resulted in consistently ‘Bluestocking’ forms of rational fiction in a primarily Scottish Enlightenment context. The brief overview of Burney's rational fictions focuses on a seeming paradox in her version of the rational novel—her tendency to subject her heroines to a bout of madness.

The Letters in the Story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Epistolary Novels

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

scholarly journals Quixotic Legacy: The Female Quixote and the Professional Woman Writer

Authorship ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi L. Wyett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Professional Woman ◽  
The One

This essay argues that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) served as a fulcrum in eighteenth-century literary history by providing a figuration of the female quixote for subsequent women novelists who were keen to court absorbed readers on the one hand while countering stereotypes about women's critical failings on the other. The figure of the female quixote proves to be a significant mark of literary professionalism by reifying the spectre of the professional writer’s need for absorbed readers and dramatizing the occasion by which the woman writer demonstrates her own authority, paradoxically allowing both woman novel reader and woman novel writer to lay claim to intellectual authority. Ultimately, the main character Arabella's fictional model potentially echoes more actual eighteenth-century women’s experiences than her adventures at first suggest: the female quixote emerges as less a social outcast or a freak than a figure for women’s commonality, especially their intellectual and ethical ambitions in a world inimical to their interests.

‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings’

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Tegan
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
The Temple

Eighteenth-century critics commonly used birth topoi to ridicule writing they believed to be uninspired or imitative, but their attacks on the bad form and excesses of women’s novels were particularly pointed. Novels were not so much authored as begotten—through suspect feminized spaces like the circulating library and the automatic reproduction of formulaic fiction. Such judgments were felt keenly by women writers, as evidenced by Frances Burney’s anxiety about the fate of her second offspring, Cecilia, and her prefatory allegory of authorial corruption at the Temple of Vanity. Vanity, it was suggested, was not only the motivating force behind women novelists’ endeavors, it might also be fostered through the reading of sentimental fiction. This essay explores the transmission of affect between women readers and writers, reframing the creative and destabilizing powers of vanity to argue that copious nothings divert readers and writers’ attention from domestic cares, disrupting the projections of masculine prerogative.

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