Description
Book SynopsisContests the notion that women occupied a separate private sphere in England during the Romantic Era. This title demonstrates the various ways in which they attempted to shape British public policy and cultural behaviour in the areas of religious and governmental reform, education, philanthropy, and patterns of consumption.
Trade ReviewIntellectual 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 * Choice *
. . . this bracing and important work of revision deserves a place in serious academic libraries serving both undergraduates and advanced scholars.December 2002
* Choice *
Table of ContentsContents
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
Desmond
Persuasion
Postscript: The Politics of Modernity
Notes
Works Cited
Index
