“The Darts to Wound With Endless Love!” on Hannah Cowley’s Response to Frances Burney’s Evelina

The paper traces the intertextual echoes of Frances Burney’s debut novel, Evelina, in The Belle’s Stratagem, a play by Burney’s contemporary Hannah Cowley. The latter was certainly an avid admirer of Burney. In one of her poems she pays tribute to the novelist and praises her ability to achieve uncommon subtlety in the depiction of characters in her writing: “What pen but Burney’s …/… draws from nature with a skill so true” (Escott 2012: 38). The paper, however, argues that the connection between the writers and their literary productions goes much further than the obeisance paid to Burney in Cowley’s admiring verses. The congruence between the plots of Evelina and The Belle’s Stratagem, and, in some instances, the very wording used in the two texts, poses immediate questions about its significance in Cowley’s popular play (which was first produced in 1780, two years after the publication of Burney’s debut). The conclusions suggest that Cowley deliberately drew Burney’s novel into a discussion on viable models of femininity and matrimony in contemporary society. But they also point to a wider phenomenon, namely, the extent to which the relationship between the eighteenth-century theatre and novel was reciprocal. While several recent studies discuss the influence of the theatre on the novel, little has been said on the importance of the novel for the development of the contemporary drama. This new reading of Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem as a response to Burney’s Evelina shows the immediacy with which a literary dialogue could be opened by authors and appreciated by audiences on the vibrant eighteenth-century cultural scene.

The Female Authors of Cadell and Davies

This chapter explores the publishing firm of Cadell and Davies and its relationships with its female authors. During the seven decades in which it operated, in various incarnations between 1765 and 1836, the firm published many influential female authors of the period, including Fanny Burney, Hannah Cowley, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Maria Williams. Through a careful examination of the surviving correspondence and the bibliographical history of their publications of women's writing, this chapter engages in a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the firm’s business practices and women’s engagement with the commercial world of print. The print networks described in the chapter emphasize the centralized position, and asymmetrical power, that male publishers held within a marketplace abundant with female writers seeking to print their works.

‘A lasting wreath of various hue’: Hannah Cowley, the Della Cruscan Affair, and the Medium of the Periodical Poem

The flirty poetic back-and-forth between Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley) and Della Crusca (Robert Merry) helped launch the fledgling World (1787–1851) into the rank of one of the most popular London periodicals of its age. Tanya Caldwell moves past the sensationalism of their exchange to evaluate the married dramatist Cowley’s choice to participate in it as a means of involving a woman’s voice and perspective in topical – even radical – discussions as well as traditional, and traditionally male-dominated, classic poetic forms. A generic innovator in the drama, Cowley is also shown to be a canny professional writer with respect to the possibilities periodical publication could offer to women like herself.

Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.