2009/10 Programme
Saturday 26th September 2009, Stewart House, Basement, Room STB2:
Katie Halsey, “’Gossip’ and ‘Twaddle’: ‘common readers’ make sense of Austen”, 2:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
In “Jane Austen”, Virginia Woolf suggested that much of our knowledge of Austen’s life and works was dependent on “a little gossip, a few letters, and her books”. Henry James dismissed early twentieth-century writing about Austen as the “pleasant twaddle of magazines,” attributing her success to the “stiff breeze of the commercial” and finding her to be “infinitely…saleable”. In recent years, Austen scholars have begun to focus more seriously on material previously been dismissed as “gossip” and “twaddle”, in other words, on the ways in which non-literary and commercial factors affect Austen’s reception and reputation.
In this paper, I will draw on some non-literary evidence: the material in the Reading Experience Database 1450-1945, an AHRC-funded research project whose aim is to collect information about the reading of actual historical readers. The project collects and collates data from diaries, letters, autobiographies, marginalia, and other historical sources, and aims to produce a representative sample of readers in any given historical period. I will consider Austen’s historical readers, and suggest ways in which their testimony might be useful to Austen studies in the future.
Austen’s readers use the name of “Jane Austen” in many different ways – as a variable signifier deployed as both example and warning in discussions about gender, class, manners, emotions, intelligence, criticism and fiction. Through an interconnecting web of relationships – familial, epistolary and social – Austen’s readers spell out their own positions in contemporary debates, using Jane Austen as a touchstone to which they can refer in shared jokes, running arguments, and sometimes with a casual allusiveness that denotes deep and comfortable familiarity. “Jane Austen” does not, of course, mean the same thing to every reader, whether critic or common reader, and this paper explores some of the range of significations, private and public, that her name took on in the long nineteenth century, while discussing the kinds of reading that these significations enable or demand.
Hannah Newton, “’Nott a sadder creature in the world’: Mothers' and Fathers' Emotional Responses to their Children's Deaths in Early Modern England, c.1580-1720”, 3:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
This paper asks how parents responded emotionally to their children's deaths, examining the various 'stages of grief'. An underlying theme will be the importance of gender in shaping mothers' and fathers' expressions of emotions. Historians have often suggested that maternal grief may have been more intense than paternal grief, owing to the close maternal bond between infants and mothers, and the greater leniency afforded to the female sex in expressing their emotions. This paper will suggest that these differences may have been over-stated, agreeing with Patricia Phillippy that 'generally speaking...men were subject to grief as profound as their wives' at child-loss'. It will also be shown that while the intensity of parent's emotional responses seems to have been similar, the extent to which these emotions were expressed sometimes did vary for men and women. Above all, this paper demonstrates the emotional intensity of parent-child relations in early modern England, and the unbearable sorrow experienced by bereaved parents. The primary sources include over one hundred diaries, autobiographies and collections of letters, forty printed biographies of pious children, and a selection of possession cases and doctors' casebooks.
Sam George, “Animated Beings: Enlightenment Entomology for Girls”, 4:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
This paper will explore how Linnaean methodology was transmitted in entomology texts for young girls by writers such as Priscilla Wakefield and Louisa Beaufort. I investigate the circulation of scientific and European ideas by women both inside and outside the text focussing on British women writer’s engagement with Linnaeus and the use of the familiar letter in such works. In Wakefield’s An introduction to the natural history and classification of insects in a series if familiar letters (1816), for example, the tone is one of mutual improvement brought about by an intimate exchange of knowledge between two sisters. Wakefield’s entomological letters are exemplary in that they indicate the ambivalence in the process of the feminisation of natural science: whilst they are open to a liberationist reading, offering young women access to scientific knowledge for the first time, they also have a conservative function in that they can reaffirm conduct book constructions of femininity. I aim to bring out these ambivalences and contradictions.
From this, I develop my argument more broadly and situate entomology texts within debates on juvenile literature in the Romantic period. Wakefield’s lessons on entomology form part of a wave of instructional literature that emerges broadly out of the rationalist line, seen by Romantics like Lamb as too overtly didactic. The letters participate in the dissemination and circulation of these educational debates. The preface implies that natural history books have usurped the imaginative ‘Histories of Tom Thumb, and Woglog the Giant’. This is significant because it shows the Romantics’ perception of a division in kinds of juvenile literature of the period where instruction is opposed to amusement and the real world to the fantasy world. I argue that this perception is mistaken; Beaufort and Wakefield’s letters on entomology in fact subvert this supposed shift in juvenile literature and straddle the complicated boundary between Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Such debates illustrate the cross fertilisation and circulation of ideas involving literature, education, sexuality and natural science, in women’s entomological texts of the period.
Saturday 28th November 2008, Stewart House, Basement, Room STB2:
Catherine Eagleton, “The world in one room: Sarah Sophia Banks and her ‘collection of scraps’”, 2:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
I'll be talking about Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), sister of the more famous Sir Joseph Banks, and her collections of printed ephemera and coins, medals and tokens. I'll be looking at her collecting networks, her links to other collectors of the period, and at what the aims behind her collections were.
Valeria de Lucca, “’Pallade al valor, Venere al volto’: Music, Theatricality, and Performance in Maria Mancini Colonna’s Patronage”, 3:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
My paper investigates Maria Mancini’s activity as a patron of music and theatrical entertainments between 1661—the year of her arrival to Rome from Paris to marry Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna—and 1672—when she left both Rome and her husband with a highly publicised and bold flight. Uniting her Parisian taste for entertainments with her great passion for Venetian opera and theatre, during the time she spent in Rome Mancini organized exotic masquerades, eccentric carnival floats, lively salons open to artists and intellectuals, balls and serenades, revitalising the Roman cultural life —whether as patron or as performer—in unprecedented ways.
Although numerous studies have examined Maria Mancini Colonna and her adventurous life, her role as patron has only received scant consideration. Based on an array of primary sources made available here for the first time, including Mancini’s autobiographies, letters, avvisi di Roma, and archival records found in the Colonna Archive, my paper provides new insights not only into the musical life of mid-seventeenth century Rome but also into the dynamics of female patronage of music and theatre. The case of Maria Mancini stands out as a complex example of patronage in seventeenth-century music and culture. Her support of the arts, which seems to be motivated not by the desire to increase the power and prestige of the Colonna family but rather by her own passion for entertainments, becomes a means to negotiate her freedom from her husband and the strictures of Roman society.
Gill Manning, “The ‘licences...of writing loosely’? Aspects of Behn's Poetic Practice”, 4:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
I'll be considering some aspects of Behn's poetic practice in the light of contemporary comments on her work, both for and against. In particular, I'll be discussing her supposedly 'loose' writing - 'loose'/'loosely' being (usually) opprobrious terms, often employed by Restoration writers in assailing each other's work. In their first sense of 'bawdy', or 'immoral', these terms were applied to Behn's poetry by several of her colleagues, most famously, by Dryden. I'm interested in trying to unpick/define in what particulars and to what extent Behn's poems might be seen as transgressive in late C17th terms, and in what ways she might be said to modify contemporary poetic modes and practices.In its second sense, the term 'loose' relates to technique, and suggests that the writing in question is careless, slack, rambling or prolix. In this section of the paper, I'll be looking at some of Behn's translations and imitations (especially OEnone to Paris, and her version of Horace Odes 1.5). I'll also be discussing her Pindaric Poem To The Reverend Doctor Burnet ... (1689).
Saturday 30th January 2010, Stewart House, Second Floor, Room ST273:
Lois Chaber, “Mrs Hofland and the Pasha of Egypt: one woman’s collusion with Empire” (an illustrated talk), 2:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
Since the 1990s, there has been a large body of scholarship discovering and discussing the collusion, both conscious and unconscious, between British women writers of the long eighteenth century and the ideology of imperialism. Barbara Hofland, a once-popular children’s author of the early 19th century, and a friend of the ‘orientalists’ Edward Lane & John Soane, is a particularly interesting example of one of these women.
Despite the ‘faded quality’ her biographer imputes to her second-hand travel writings, the 1841 revision of her Young Pilgrim, or, Alfred Campbell’s Return to the East (orig. pub. 1826), proves an extraordinary ‘hybrid’ witness, opening a window onto a specific imperial moment, ‘Britain’s intervention in non-European countries at a time before the more concrete Victorian structures of the British Empire came into place’ (Carol Bolton). In the winter of 1840, just as Hofland was preparing her ‘new edition’, Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy involved Britain and its allies in a standoff between the weakened Turkish government and the encroaching Pasha of Egypt, Muhammed Ali. Hofland’s changes—not only her disproportionate appendix avidly recounting this Levantine skirmish within a framework of Christian millenarianism, but also tendentious rearrangements of the volume’s illustrations, its newly-convoluted chronology, and, especially, her profoundly ambiguous portrait of the Pasha—unwittingly unmask Britain’s ‘unselfish’ peace-brokering as commercial anxiety and colonial aspiration.
However, I will suggest that Hofland’s jingoism and racism must be seen in the light of her personal circumstances and the publishing trade’s treatment of female children’s authors, and they are also modified in this same later edition by her attraction to the writings of a more tolerant ‘real’ woman traveller.
CarolAnne Selway, “Family Seventeenth Century Women’s Memoirs”. Title tbc. 3:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
Memoirs were an important piece of writing in the seventeenth century. These writings usually detail the important events and accomplishments of the life of the writer and were often prefaced by similar accounts of the writer’s parents and sometimes grandparents. Usually including dates of family births, christenings and deaths, they were sometimes used as legal documents in cases of inheritance. Contemporaries write about consulting memoirs of parents and grandparents for biographical information. Thus, memoirs were seen as a powerful vehicle not only for leaving a personal legacy, but for preserving ancestral history. Memoirs were often written for or dedicated to the writer’s children or heir, and many writers make explicit the obligation of the next generation to continue these legacies and histories.
Many literate women participated in the practice of writing memoirs. In writing their memoirs, women, like men, record the accomplishments in their lives and their family histories. This paper considers how this was a more complex project for women, as upon marriage, a woman was seen to leave her father’s family, and join her husband’s. It explores how women used memoirs as a vehicle to insert themselves into the history of their husbands’ families while maintaining their place in the histories of their original families, and how women successfully synthesized both family histories as the history of their children.
Mary Orr, “Women in tête-à-tête at the Cuvier Salon: penning the female scientific mind”,
4:00 pm.
ABSTRACT:
For French women writers and poets in the 1820s, the salon was vital for the meeting of minds and the development of the female imaginary. Nodier’s salon at the Arsenal is a case in point in the literary formation of Louise Colet or George Sand. What has not been investigated is the perhaps even more essential role of the salon in the making of the early nineteenth-century woman of science. Although women on both sides of the Channel were barred from the male worlds of the laboratory and of course scientific exploration, this paper investigates the instrumental effects of the Cuvier salon on a remarkable English woman of science, Sarah Bowdich (1791-1856).
Sarah’s many parts as natural historian, ethnographer, historian of science, educator in natural science and novelist will be examined in this paper as resulting from her experience of, training in, and contributions to the Cuvier salon. Although these prove her to be a key women in science in a period where historians of science claim no women scientists exist, this paper seeks to challenge a larger issue that is still of concern today, namely the gendering of recognition for women in international scientific arenas.
Annual Workshop
‘The link which unites man with brutes’: Enlightenment feminism, women and animals
Keynote Speaker: Jane Spencer
Saturday, 24th April 2010
Venue: Room 273 Stewart House, University of London
Further details are available on our Annual Workshop page
Professor Jane Spencer’s research expertise is in literature 1660-1830, especially the novel; women's literary history; feminist criticism; and currently the relationship between animal and human in the Enlightenment. She has published influential works in her field with her polemical contributions to feminist literary history: The Rise of the Woman Novelist, 1986 and Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, 2000. She has also written on 'kinship' in the narrative of literary history (Literary Relations, 2005); feminist criticism (editor, Political Gender, 1994) and literature and culture throughout the eighteenth-century and Romantic period. Recently she has completed work on Jane Austen (Blackwell's Companion). Her talk at this year’s Women’s Studies Group annual workshop will draw from her current research project on Enlightenment Animals: a study of the way Enlightenment thinking shaped attitudes to and representations of animals in the period. The aim of her project is to bring together eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophy, science, religious writing, poetry, novels and children's literature in a bid to uncover the way the relationship between human and non-human animals was reconceived.
Group Outing
Monday 12th July 2010, at 11:00pm.
PART ONE:
An Introduction to Friends' House Quaker Library for about an hour plus an opportunity to look at some examples of texts by early Quaker women. Featuring a talk by Althea Stewart.PART TWO:
Lunch in the Friends' House Restaurant (optional)
PART THREE:
Women's History Walk Around Bloomsbury (also optional); with commentary by Tanis Hinchcliffe, co-author of Discovering London's Buildings.