Cartesian Dualism, Real and Literary Madness in the Regency, and the Mind and Madness in Austen’s Novels

Austen’s ability to represent psychologically plausible characters poses the question of what she would have known about the mind and its disorders. An answer requires insight into the ways the mentally afflicted were treated during the Regency and mind and madness understood by some of Austen’s literary influences (William Shakespeare, James Boswell, and Elizabeth Hamilton). Austen’s depiction of mind and madness in her novels contrasts with what she knew and wrote about medicine and medical practices for physical illnesses and injuries. The tenor of the times and the circumspect treatment of mind and madness in her novels, in turn, suggest that whatever firsthand knowledge she would have had from witnessing mental impairment in two family members was scrupulously hidden.

Elizabeth Hamilton on Sympathy and the Selfish Principle

In A Series of Popular Essays (1813 ) , Scottish philosopher Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) identifies two ‘principles’ in the human mind: sympathy and the selfish principle. While sharing Adam Smith's understanding of sympathy as a capacity for fellow-feeling, Hamilton also criticizes Smith's account of sympathy as involving the imagination. Even more important for Hamilton is the selfish principle, a ‘propensity to expand or enlarge the idea of self’ that she distinguishes from both selfishness and self-love. Counteracting the selfish principle requires cultivating sympathy and benevolent affections from birth. Since no one can do this alone, Hamilton's prescription appeals ineliminably to the caregivers of the very young; and Hamilton was ahead of her time in claiming that these caregivers need not be female.

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm

Chapter Six considers the networks surrounding Sally Wesley, John Wesley’s niece and Charles Wesley’s only daughter. Wesley was at the center of a network of latter day Bluestockings who produced and circulated material around the turn of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest to this diverse group was the nature and influence of evangelical feeling and enthusiasm on British life and letters. Analysis of Wesley’s network reveals members from all social and religious backgrounds debating and discussing the proper role of religious enthusiasm—arguing for the importance of a well-regulated enthusiasm to the creation and distribution of literary work. Specifically, it explores how other women in Wesley’s circle, particularly Mary Tighe, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Spilsbury, addressed the issue of religious enthusiasm. Based on this evidence it considers the question of how religion and theology helped women like Sally Wesley structure and inform their artistic production in conversation with the shifting roles for women in Regency society and artistic movements like Romanticism.

Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism

The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of social, political, religious, and literary networks in Great Britain. The increased availability of and access to print, combined with the ease with which individuals could correspond across distance, ensured that it was easier than ever before for writers to enter into the marketplace of ideas. However, we still lack a complex understanding of how literary networks functioned, what the term ‘network’ means in context, and how women writers in particular adopted and adapted to the creative possibilities of networks. The essays in this volume address these issues from a variety of perspectives, arguing that networks not only provided women with access to the literary marketplace, but fundamentally altered how they related to each other, to their literary production, and to the broader social sphere. By examining the texts and networks of authors as diverse as Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Hamilton, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Joanna Baillie, Mary Berry, Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, this volume demonstrates that attention to the scope and influence of women’s literary networks upends long standing assumptions about gender, literary influence, and authorial formation during the Romantic period. Furthermore, this volume suggests that we must rethink what counts as literature in the Romantic period, how we read it, and how we draw the boundaries of Romanticism.

Sisters of the Quill

This chapter traces the formation of a literary network of “evangelical bluestockings” in Regency England who yearned for the Bluestocking community of the past, but were constrained and frustrated by changing social, literary, intellectual, and religious landscapes of the present. These women, including Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Benger, Marianne Francis, and Elizabeth Hamilton, used a diverse set of mediation practices (including manuscript production and circulation) to create an intellectual community oriented around evangelical religion. This chapter ultimately argues that evangelical religion and theology offered a way for these latter day Bluestockings to deal with the shifting social, cultural, and artistic conditions of turn of the century Britain and that the literary networks which coalesced around their shared religious interests represented a significant means through which literary women formed, expressed, and published their ideas.

Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Pam Perkins examines the role played by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals in both demarcating and blurring contemporary ideas around feminine writing. The essay provides an overview of critical attitudes about women’s writing and the way it was treated in major Romantic-era periodicals (the Edinburgh Review, British Critic, Anti-Jacobin), and then complicates this picture with case studies in the receptions of the writers Anne Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton, whose work pushed back against traditional generic tendencies. Both were praised, surprisingly, for being innovators as well as for evincing proper femininity. Their visibility in the print media of their own day helped to normalise the concept of female authorship, and urges us to re-examine modern critical understandings of the role that periodicals played in early Romantic norms for gendered writing.

Worldly Realism

A preliminary discussion of Northanger Abbey and Jacob’s Room, foregrounds Austen’s and Woolf’s insistence upon non-heroic, unexceptional protagonists, the challenge their writing poses to existing genres and its disjunction from established, consensual interpretive systems. Jacques Ranciére’s concept of consensual and dissensual regimes of the perceptible, and recent accounts of the constitutive relationship of inanimate objects with self, provide a theoretical framework for discussing these experimental aspects of each writer’s work. The chapter maps an epistemological tradition linking these current perspectives to the Enlightenment empiricism of David Hume, Adam Smith, David Hartley, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Austen’s contemporary. The materialism of eighteenth-century thinkers constitutes the sceptical intellectual inheritance of Austen and Woolf. It underpins their development of worldly realism, an experimental writing practice, utilising innovative focalisation techniques to foreground relations of equality across the worlds of people, things and natural universe. Hence it constitutes a radical undermining of the idealist ideology of individualism.