This module explores the construction and contestation of the politically engaged woman in Britain over the period 1770-1800, using novels, poetry, drama, biographies, pamphlets, medical texts, pornography, conduct literature and visual imagery including satirical prints and portraits. Topics for discussion will include: sexuality and sensibility, learning and patronage, marriage and domesticity, leisure and labour, posterity and reputation, abolitionism, and radical and conservative forms of ‘feminism’. We will explore these topics within a framing context of politically charged debates about female visibility, authority and participation in public life in Britain today.

Demonstrate a critical and creative understanding of theory about public and private spheres over the long eighteenth century; show in-depth knowledge of the work of women writers from this period and the genres in which they wrote; display original and critically informed insights about the work of at least two writers on the syllabus; apply critical theory about public and private spheres to a range of topical texts addressing women in public life today, and thereby form judgments about change and continuity in gender theory and social exclusion.

The module will be taught through a blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning classes and activities, designed to fulfil the learning outcomes. These will be delivered remotely, and on-campus if the University deems it safe and practicable.

The syllabus for this module unites close reading with a broad critical approach that places eighteenth-century texts concerning women in public life alongside texts addressing the same topic from 2013-2018, including radio broadcasts, Twitter feeds and journalism as well as critical articles. The first summative assignment requires students to submit a creative-critical piece of work, which will enable them to develop their creative writing skills; to engage on a more imaginative level with eighteenth-century writing by experiencing the opportunities and limitations of different generic forms; and to evaluate literature across chronological boundaries and apply critical theory to disparate cultural contexts. Discussions and exercises building towards the second piece of summative work – a conventional critical essay - aim to develop students’ skills in close reading and critical thinking by applying analytical skills to a variety of texts written by and about women over the long eighteenth century.

Employability skills will include the need to work independently and in a team, since the module will require group discussions; to synthesize information and formulate coherent arguments in an informed and professional manner; and to articulate and communicate these arguments in written and verbal form.

A blend of coursework and portfolio assessments.

Week 1: Public and private spheres: an introduction.

The lecture will offer an overview of theory concerning public and private spheres in the long eighteenth century. Starting by interrogating and contexualising our uses and understandings of the word ‘public’, it will summarise the work of Jürgen Habermas on the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere, before introducing feminist and other critiques of his theory by scholars including Kathleen Wilson, Harriet Guest, and William McCarthy. In seminar, we will develop and deepen our understanding of the historicized terms ‘public’ and ‘private’, through exercises and discussion.

Week 2: Sexuality and sensibility.

The lecture will offer an overview of theory about sexuality and sensibility in the long eighteenth century, and will question the relationship between these two constructs through a gendered lens. Drawing on the critical writing of Dror Wahrman and Tim Hitchcock and using primary texts including prints, pornography and conduct books, it will cover such topics as: the essentializing of gender, hermaphroditism, reproduction, propriety and objectification. For the seminar, students will be asked to read Frances Burney’s novel Evelina: or, Memoirs of an Heiress.

Week 3: Learning and patronage.

The lecture will begin by using Jacqueline Pearson’s critical work on female reading to establish a broad overview of how female ‘wit’ and ‘learning’ were perceived in the late eighteenth century. It will then provide two ‘case studies’ of female relationships involving conflicted forms of patronage and literary influence: Hannah More and Elizabeth Montagu’s promotion of ‘The Milkwoman of Clifton’ Ann Yearsley, and Elizabeth Montagu’s ambivalent relationship with and influence over Frances Burney. Using Jane Spencer’s theory about female influence, it will explore how female learning could be perceived from various angles as a blessing or a curse, and how female patronage could provide friendship, support and exposure - or otherwise. For the seminar, students will read two of Ann Yearsley’s poems addressed to Elizabeth Montagu, and also Frances Burney’s play The Witlings.

Week 4: Marriage and domesticity / Leisure and labour

The lecture will draw on William Blackstone’s legal writings and the critical work of Joanne Bailey and Gillian Skinner, to sketch an overview of the legal and cultural statuses of married women in Georgian society. It will ask how ‘domesticity’ related to the ideas of marriage and motherhood, and how notions of ‘labour’ and ‘leisure’ jostled shoulders within this conceptual field. In the seminar, we will read poetry by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Ann Yearsley that focuses on women’s day-to-day labour, asking how its value is mediated in different and sometimes surprising rhetorical ways. Students should also read Stuart Curran’s essay ‘The I Altered’.

Week 5: Posterity and reputation.

The lecture will consider how the posthumous reputations of eighteenth-century women were constructed and contested, in discourses including the obituary, the epitaph and the visual satire. It will then move to consider the lives, reputations and legacies of two very different influential literary women - Mary Wollstonecraft and Hester Thrale Piozzi - and the tensions between the desire to display propriety and the desire for fame in their writings. For the seminar, students will be asked to read Thrale Piozzi’s ‘Three Dialogues on the Death of Hester Lynch Thrale’ and William Godwin’s Memoir of Wollstonecraft.

Week 6: Abolitionism

The lecture will provide an overview of the slave trade and the abolition movement, and of women’s contributions to both. Drawing upon Brycchan Carey’s critical work on the role of the rhetoric of sensibility in discourses of abolition, it will pose questions about how gender intersects with race as categories of identity in the abolitionist writings of Barbauld, Yearsley, Hannah More, and Phyllis Wheatley. For the seminar, students will read a selection of abolition poems by these writers.

Week 7: Radical feminism I:  Visibility

The lecture will provide an overview of the British ‘Pamphlet War’ that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution, beginning with an assessment of the political implications of Edmund Burke’s Reflections and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. We will then move to consider the place of Mary Wollstonecraft in the Revolution Controversy, and use Barbara Taylor’s critical work on Wollstonecraft’s writings to draw out some of its major innovations and tensions, before considering its reception in texts including Richard Polewhele’s scathing attack on reformist and radical female writers, The Unsex’d Females. For the seminar, students will read extracts from Wollstonecraft’s pamphlets Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Week 8: Radical feminism II: Inclusion

Providing an overview of the emergence of radical societies such as the London Corresponding Society during the 1790s, the lecture will discuss how far women were actually involved in the day-to-day activity of these organisations. Women were not allowed to speak at meetings and female suffrage was not considered by the LCS, but recent work has indicated that they were understood to participate in radical life in numerous other ways. The lecture will conclude by considering how political radicalism and proto-feminism intersect and come into conflict in the fiction and poetry of Charlotte Smith. For the seminar, students will be asked to read extracts from Smith’s ‘Jacobin’ novel Desmond and her poem The Emigrants.

Week 9: Conservative feminism

The penultimate lecture will provide an overview of the career of Hannah More, one of the most successful counter-actors to the radical ‘threat’ of Paine and Wollstonecraft. Building on our knowledge of More as an abolitionist and patron, we will consider her Cheap Repository Tracts as art, propaganda and perhaps something else entirely. We will also consider Hester Thrale Piozzi’s later career, and the ways in which she used the idea of female prophecy to command literary authority at times of political crisis. For the seminar, students will read More’s tract Village Politics and Thrale Piozzi’s manuscript tract ‘Address to the Females of Great Britain’.

Week 10: Voice and gender

The last lecture will bring together some ideas about gender and the literal voice - how women are supposed to speak aloud and how they do so in practice- both from the late eighteenth century and from the present day. It will explore the phenomenon of eighteenth-century debating societies where women as well as men often spoke in favour of or against a controversial motion, and sometimes even formed their own societies in which men were excluded from speaking. In the module’s spirit of continuity and change, the lecture will then turn to look at socio-linguistic research about men and women speaking in public in the present day which might give us reason to think constructively about how gender affects us when we are speaking publicly. This lecture contributes towards preparation for the final seminar, in which the students will themselves make their ideas ‘public’ by giving an informal presentation about their plans for their essay.

Course readings will be made available on Learning Central.

Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: The story of a literary relationship (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013).

Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

** Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds., Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997).

** G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

** Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Jennie Batchelor, Women’s Work; Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (London: Random House, 1986)

Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

** Deborah Cameron, ‘Theorising the Female Voice in Public Contexts’, Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts, ed. Judith Baxter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp.3-20.

** Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Lorna J. Clark, (ed.), A Celebration of Frances Burney. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

Lilla Maria Crisafulli, ‘Women and Abolitionism: Hannah More's and Ann Yearsley's Poetry of Freedom’, in Imagining Transatlantic Slavery, eds. Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 110-124.

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London: Routledge, 1997).

** Margaret Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, eds., Women’s Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

** Elizabeth Eger et al, eds. Women, Writing and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Coverture and Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), 1-16.

Kevin Gilmartin, 'Study to Be Quiet': Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain’, ELH 70.2 (2003 Summer): 493-540.

** Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago University Press, 2000).

** Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).

** Vivien Jones, ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Madeleine Kahn, ‘Hannah More and Ann Yearsley: A Collaboration across the Class Divide’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 25 (1996): 203-223.

Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Gary Kelly, ‘Woman Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelising the Revolution / Revolutionizing the Novel’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 6:4 (1994), 369-388.

Jacqueline M Labbe, (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750-1830, Volume 5 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

_________________ (ed). Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008).

Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation 1712-1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008.)

** ______________, ‘The Repression of Hester Lynch Piozzi; or, How we Forgot a Revolution in Authorship.’ Modern Language Studies, 18:1 (Winter, 1988), 99-111.

Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

** Anne Mellor,  Mothers of the Nation – Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Republished 2002).

Jane Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft (Farnham: Ashgate, May 2012).

**  Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A dangerous recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Leslie Richardson, ‘Who Shall Restore My Lost Credit? Rape, Reputation and the Marriage Market.’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003), 19-44.

** Gillian Skinner, ‘Women’s status as legal and civic subjects: ‘A worse condition than slavery itself’?, in Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

** Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (PLACE?, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977)

Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

** Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

** Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).