1558-1837
Interested in giving a paper at one of our meetings? For more information, consult our latest Call for Papers
View our Archives for details of past events
Current Programme
Saturday 27th September 2007, Stewart House, Basement, Room STB2:
Stephen Bending, “Retirement and Disgrace: Women and Gardens in the Eighteenth Century,” 2:00pm.
ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1760 Sarah Lennox could be found in the hay fields of Holland Park: dressed in her finest clothes, and with one eye on the turnpike road, she was a shepherdess in search of a prince. This was no pastoral daydream, however, for the prince in question was the newly crowned George III and for a time-with the aid of her pastoral trappings-it seemed that she might succeed in becoming the queen of England. Ten years later, disgraced by an extra-marital affair, and hidden away in an old manor house, she had swapped the landscape of pastoral for a landscape of disgrace. Forced by her family to exchange the pastoral for the penitential, the career of Sarah Lennox in the 1760s traversed the extremes of how her society imagined a woman in a garden. If this language of pastoral romance and shameful retirement, of shepherdesses, piety, and penitents, of old manor houses and Edenic gardens seems the fanciful stuff of fiction, the staple of visual and poetic effusions, and in short a fictive world we should be careful to distinguish from lived experience, I will argue instead that such verbal and visual models were never far from the leisured elite, that they were amongst the first, and most powerful associations to come to mind, and that when we look to the gardens created by women in the eighteenth century, representations of retirement and disgrace, of pastoral, piety, and penitence are fundamental to the ways in which they imagine themselves and were in turn imaged by others. The very ubiquity of myths, visual traditions and narratives surrounding the garden was what in part enabled women to imagine and shape both their lives as individuals and their place in society; but those same myths and traditions could be cripplingly detrimental, and the weight of cultural expectations could be crushing.
Judith Hawley, “Aristocratic Amateur Dramatics, c. 1780-1830,” 3:00pm.
ABSTRACT: Judith Hawley's paper concerns private theatricals in the period c. 1780-1830. Her case studies are Elizabeth Yorke, Countess Hardwicke and Elizabeth Craven, Margravine of Anspach.
Moira Goff, “A Drury Lane Inheritance,” 3:40pm.
ABSTRACT: In 1713 the Drury Lane dancer-actress Hester Santlow gave birth to an illegitimate daughter Harriot, her only child. The baby's father was James Craggs the Younger, an aspiring young politician who would become a Secretary of State under George I. Hester Santlow married her fellow actor Barton Booth in 1719. Craggs never married and died in 1721. Despite the circumstances of her birth, Harriot was accepted without question as her father's sole heir. She married into the Cornish gentry and became the mother of a large family which soon rose into the aristocracy. After her retirement from the stage, Hester Booth was closely involved with all of them. My presentation will raise several questions relating to social status and social mobility in Georgian England.
Saturday 29th November 2007, Stewart House, Second Floor, Room ST273:
Clare Barlow, "Female authorship in the public eye: virtue, patriotism, and portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain," 2:00pm.
ABSTRACT: Women writers were phenomenally successful in mid eighteenth-century Britain. They were celebrated as objects of national pride, whose presence in society proved its refinement. This paper explores the background to this celebration. It examines the model of virtuous authorship developed by writers such as the poet and classical translator Elizabeth Carter; the role such authors played in assertions of national supremacy; and the visual representation of female writing and learning.
Julia Gasper, “Corsican Women - Beyond the Stereotypes,” 3:00pm.
ABSTRACT: Prevailing stereotypes of Corsican women include the voceratrice, the vengeful mother and the victim of honour killing. I am trying to do fresh research into the part that Corsican women have always played in the interminable battle that has been Corsican history. Some have been mediators and peacemakers, but many more have been fierce warriors, and for a large number the reality for centuries was of survival without men.
Peggy Yoon, “Sensibility Revisited: Moral Sentiments in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda,” [provisional title] 4:00pm.
Saturday 31st January 2007, Stewart House, Second Floor, Room ST273:
Marion Durnin, “Mrs Samuel Carter Hall; Bannow's unlikely flâneur in Sketches of Irish Character," 2:00pm.
Sharon Ruston, “Instinct and habit: Gender and Natural History in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication,” 3:00pm.
ABSTRACT: When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) ‘I am sorry to observe, that reason and duty have not so powerful an influence over human conduct, as instinct has in the brute creation’, she had yet to read William Smellie’s Philosophy of Natural History (1790). She took Smellie to task in her review of this book for his theory that instincts are the same (but lesser) versions of reason. In this paper I argue that this review, along with others that she wrote of natural history books during the period of writing Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), helped to form and shape ideas that she held on the subject of gender, or how, in her words, females ‘are made women of when they are
mere children’.
Danielle Glover, "Beautiful harpists: the portrayal of the female body in early nineteenth-century representations of harp-playing," 4:00pm.
ABSTRACT: 'The Mirror of the Graces or Hints on Female Accomplishments and Manners' (1811) represents the harp as a musical instrument that elegantly displays the female body. References to body parts, such as the arm, hand, foot and neck, pervade descriptions of amateur female harp-playing in this treatise, focussing on the musical woman's body rather than her proficiency, thus inviting the male gaze. It was published when there was a debate about whether female accomplishments (leisure activities such as harp-playing and drawing) constituted the ideal education for women. Saturating accounts of harp-playing with descriptions of the body, novels contributed to this debate by questioning how far harp-playing was a manipulative courtship device. This paper analyses the extent to which Austen's 'Mansfield Park' and Frances Burney's 'The Wanderer' critique the pursuit of musical accomplishment through satirising female harpists and how similar this critique is to Wollstonecraft's arguments against the pursuit of female accomplishments. It also asks how far episodes in MG. Lewis' 'The Monk' and Sydney Owenson's 'The Wild Irish Girl' idealise female harpists through the representation of their body and whether idealising the harpist's body was a way of promoting musical accomplishment. By analysing fictional episodes alongside Gainsborough's painting of the elegant harpist Lady Louisa Clarges, this paper considers reasons behind the representation of beautiful harpists.
Saturday, 7 March 2009:
WSG Annual Workshop, Room 273 Stewart House, University of London
The 2009 workshop will be on the theme of WOMEN AND WAX. Our Keynote Speaker, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, will give a paper entitled "Women and Wax in the Age of Enlightment." For further information, and to register your interest, please see our Annual Workshop page.
Group Outing
Details and call for participants to come at a later date.