DOCSLIB.ORG

Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814 Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) 2014 Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814 Ada Sharpe Wilfrid Laurier University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Sharpe, Ada, "Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814" (2014). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 1663. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1663 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. POLISH OR WORK? FOUR WOMEN NOVELISTS AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF ACCOMPLISHMENT, 1796-1814 By Ada Sharpe B.A. English (Hons.), Wilfrid Laurier University, 2008 M.A. English, University of Alberta, 2009 Ph.D. DISSERTATION Submitted to the Department of English and Film Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy in English and Film Studies Wilfrid Laurier University © Ada Sharpe 2014 Abstract Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814 examines the ways in which cultural models of accomplished, industrious femininity find expression in four novels written by women during the Romantic period: Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter (1801), Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). This dissertation reads accomplishment as a pervasive and familiar cultural practice that writers use to interrogate domestic ideology and middle-class women’s position in commercial society within the space of popular fiction. I focus, specifically, on instances in which the genteel heroine turns privately honed artistic skills to remunerative labour, what I refer to as the professionalization of accomplishment. I do so in order to complicate the critical assumption that domesticity occupies a fundamentally antithetical relationship to work in Romantic-era fiction by women. Accomplishment, in these novels, assumes import as a specialized realm of knowledge, application, and self-fulfillment, and offers the rhetorical framework through which these writers narrate the heroine’s search for economic self-sufficiency, moral self-government, and social integration within but also beyond the confines of the private sphere and its ideology of domestic femininity. In doing so, this project challenges a critical heritage in literary studies, British women’s history, and art history that has long dismissed female accomplishment and the decorative arts as the distraction of leisure hours and the polish of ornamental femininity in the private sphere. Linking accomplishment to the Protestant ethic of self-regulation and self-improvement through work, these novels ii claim a place for their heroines in society as rational subjects, contributors to public, economic life, moral reformers, and creators of culture. Read collectively, these novels represent a broad feminist appeal for social justice in which individual merit and self-exertion supplant hierarchies of sexual difference in shaping the social, cultural, and economic relations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. iii Acknowledgments I have worked with a stellar and inspiring group of scholars throughout the inception and completion of this project: Eleanor Ty, Markus Poetzsch, Jennifer Esmail, and Michael Moore. Without their encouragement, wisdom, and expertise, this project would have been impossible. The Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University has provided a warm and supportive community for me throughout the completion of this project. This research was made possible by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and several years of funding through the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. I am also grateful for the funding I received to undertake international research fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art and Chawton House Library. Thank you to my friends, Jazmine and Sarah-Jean, who have listened to me and had confidence in my work. The love and support of my parents, Shelley Gilmour and Bob Sharpe, have been unconditional and untiring over the past five years, and my gratitude cannot be expressed in words. Thanks are equally due to Kenry, my brother, friend, and unparalleled movie-viewing companion, who keeps me in touch with the world beyond academia. This project is dedicated to the memory of the amiable and accomplished Bernice Wray Sharpe (nee Armstrong), 1917-2004. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vi Introduction: Polish or Work? 1 Chapter 1: “Nothing henceforth but my industry shall relieve me”: Rewriting the “Fallen” Heroine Through the Narrative of Redemptive Labour in Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter 49 Chapter 2: The “blessed art” of Self-Control: Mary Brunton, Moral-Domestic Fiction, and the Professionalization of Accomplishment 93 Chapter 3: Orphan, Embroiderer, Insect, Queen: The “Elegant and Ingenious” Art of Being Ellena in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian 143 Chapter 4: “Endowed with every power to set prejudice at defiance”: The Wanderer’s Accomplished Sentimental Heroine in the Post-Revolutionary Period 177 Conclusion 235 Works Cited 243 v List of Figures Figure 1 Mary Linwood, Napoleon Bonaparte (1825) (woolen canvas embroidered in wool). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 15 Figure 2 Map of Juliet’s Wanderings in the New Forest 226 vi Introduction: Polish or work? In mid-December 1796, needlework artist Mary Linwood (1755-1845), at that time giving instruction at a girls’ boarding school in Leicester, wrote to the guardian of one of her young pupils, requesting that Miss Simms “defer her departure” for the Christmas holiday “at least a week.” By then, Linwood hoped, she will nearly have completed her Work, wch she does much to her credit, [It] would be very mortifying, and be but of little use to her to take it home unfinish’d – she has not been idle I assure you, on the contrary, in my opinion, [she] has done a great deal for the time she has been at school – The needlework assigned to Miss Simms as part of her boarding school curriculum, a staple in British girls’ domestic and institutional programs of education into the late nineteenth century, is in Linwood’s view a work of concentrated application not to be set aside “unfinish’d.” This “Work” is no trifling boarding school accomplishment, that perennial target for attack in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates surrounding women’s education and morality, but is testament to this pupil’s industry and development under the guidance of an accomplished needlewoman.1 Linwood’s letter offers insight into the “army of women for whom craft skills furnished a livelihood, as teachers, tutors, educational authors, and occasionally exhibitors” in Romantic-era Britain (Vickery, “Theory and Practice” 96). A ubiquitous aspect of British cultural life and “an inescapable feature of the curricula of commercial schools for girls” between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, the “female accomplishments” and the related field of the decorative arts – 1 Birmingham native Mary Linwood began experimenting with needle painting during her teenage years and developed a lifelong practice. Presently, scholarship and biographical material on Linwood remains very limited. 1 activities such as music-making, sketching and painting, embroidery, japanning (lacquering), and filigree and shell work – occupy a far “more central” place in British Romantic “culture than history and art history have so far allowed,” Amanda Vickery argues (“Theory and Practice” 94-96). Described in period conduct books, personal correspondence, how-to manuals, magazines, and novels, these cultural practices also occupy a hitherto overlooked and integral role in defining and expressing middle-class women’s relationship to the public, economic sphere and the world of work in a historical period in which both were increasingly coded as the realm of masculine endeavour in contradistinction to a private, feminized realm of leisure and consumption. Offering a glimpse into one young woman’s education in the female accomplishments at the close of the eighteenth century, this brief epistolary account of Miss Simms’s progress on her needlework also intimates the professional expectations of her teacher, one of the most celebrated needlework artists of the nineteenth century: here Mary Linwood – teacher, artist, working woman – articulates her wish to see the mutual investment of time and effort brought to fruition in the completed work. The present study illuminates the ways in which cultural models of accomplished, industrious femininity, such as that epitomized by the historical Mary Linwood, find expression in four novels written by women during the Romantic period: Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter (1801), Mary Brunton’s Self- Control (1811), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). I read accomplishment as a pervasive and familiar cultural practice that these writers use to interrogate domestic ideology and middle-class women’s
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Curriculum Vitae
    1 Academic Curriculum Vitae Dr. Sharon-Ruth Alker Current Position 2020 to date Chair of Division II: Humanities and Arts 2018 to date Mary A. Denny Professor of English and General Studies 2017 to date Professor of English and General Studies 2017 to 2019 Chair of the English Department, Whitman College 2010 to 2017 Associate Professor of English and General Studies Whitman College 2004 to 2010 Assistant Professor of English and General Studies Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA. Education *University of Toronto – 2003-2004 Postdoctoral Fellowship * University of British Columbia - 1998 to 2003 - PhD. English, awarded 2003 Gendering the Nation: Anglo-Scottish relations in British Letters 1707-1830 * Simon Fraser University - 1998 MA English * Simon Fraser University - 1996 BA English and Humanities Awards 2020 Aid to Scholarly Publications Award, Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Canadian). This is a peer-reviewed grant. For Besieged: The Post War Siege Trope, 1660-1730. 2019 Whitman Perry Grant to work with student Alasdair Padman on a John Galt edition. 2018 Whitman Abshire Grant to work with student Nick Maahs on a James Hogg 2 website 2017 Whitman Perry Grant to work with student Esther Ra on James Hogg’s Uncollected Works and an edition of John Galt’s Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk 2017 Whitman Abshire Grant to work with student Esther Ra on James Hogg’s Manuscripts 2016 Co-organized a conference that received a SSHRC Connection Grant to organize the Second World Congress of Scottish Literatures. Conference was in June 2017. 2015 Whitman Perry Grant to work with student Nicole Hodgkinson on chapters of the military siege monograph.
    [Show full text]
  • Adeline Mowbray, Or, the Bitter Acceptance of Woman’S Fate
    Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 23 (2010): 187-211 Adeline Mowbray, or, the Bitter Acceptance of Woman’s Fate Aída Díaz Bild University of La Laguna [email protected] ABSTRACT Eighteenth-century women writers believed that the novel was the best vehicle to educate women and offer them a true picture of their lives and “wrongs”. Adelina Mowbray is the result of Opie’s desire to fulfil this important task. Opie does not try to offer her female readers alternatives to their present predicament or an idealized future, but makes them aware of the fact that the only ones who get victimized in a patriarchal system are always the powerless, that is to say, women. She gives us a dark image of the vulnerability of married women and points out not only how uncommon the ideal of companionate marriage was in real life, but also the difficulty of finding the appropriate partner for an egalitarian relationship. Lastly, she shows that there is now social forgiveness for those who transgress the established boundaries, which becomes obvious in the attitude of two of the most compassionate and generous characters of the novel, Rachel Pemberton and Emma Douglas, towards Adelina. Amelia Opie was one of the most popular and celebrated authors during the 1800s and 1810s, whose techniques and themes reveal her to be a representative woman novelist of her time. Unfortunately, her achievements were eclipsed by those of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Charles Dickens or the Brontës, and for a long time her work remained entirely forgotten. However, in the last years there has been a growing interest to recover and reappraise her novels and poems, trying to establish links between Opie and other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers.
    [Show full text]
  • DISCOVER NLS Answer to That Question Is ‘Plenty’! Our Nation’S Issue 24 WINTER 2013 Contribution to the Rest of Mankind Is Substantial CONTACT US and Diverse
    LAW AND ORDER ON FILM Documenting the fight against crime The magazine of the National Library of Scotland www.nls.uk | Issue 24 Winter 2013 f t h Wha’s Like Us An A-Z of what Scotland has b given the world s j x p Best-selling Scots of Launching the NLS Field Marshal the 19th century Gaelic catalogue Haig’s war diary WELCOME Celebrating Scotland’s global contribution What has Scotland given to the world? The quick DISCOVER NLS answer to that question is ‘plenty’! Our nation’s ISSUE 24 WINTER 2013 contribution to the rest of mankind is substantial CONTACT US and diverse. We welcome all comments, For a small country we have more than pulled our questions, submissions and subscription enquiries. weight, contributing significantly to science, economics, Please write to us at the politics, the arts, design, food and philosophy. And there National Library of Scotland address below or email are countless other examples. Our latest exhibition, [email protected] Wha’s Like Us? A Nation of Dreams and Ideas, which is covered in detail in these pages, seeks to construct FOR NLS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF an alphabetical examination of Scotland’s role in Alexandra Miller shaping the world. It’s a sometimes surprising collection EDITORIAL ADVISER Willis Pickard of exhibits and ideas, ranging from cloning to canals, from gold to Grand Theft Auto. Diversity is also at the heart of Willis Pickard’s special CONTRIBUTORS Bryan Christie, Martin article in this issue. Willis is a valued member of the Conaghan, Jackie Cromarty, Library’s Board, but will soon be standing down from that Gavin Francis, Alec Mackenzie, Nicola Marr, Alison Metcalfe, position.
    [Show full text]
  • Memoir of Amelia Opie
    ' • ; ,: mmff^fffiKiiJiM mm —-rt FROM THE LIBRARY OF REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO THE LIBRARY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY — : Amelia Opie'3 Later Ye.mis.—She sud- denly discovered that all is vanity : she took to gray silks and muslin, and the " thee" and " thou," quoted Habakkuk and Micah with gusto, and set her heart upon preach- ing. That, however, was not allowed. Her Quaker friends could never be sufficiently sure how much was " imagination," and how much the instigation of "the inward witness;" and the privileged gallery in the chapel was closed against her, and her utterance was confined to loud sighs in the body of the Meeting. She tende I is decline ; she im- proved greatly in balance of mind and even- ness of spirits during her long and close in- timacy v ith the Gukneys : and there never l1 her beneficent disposi- tion, shown bv her family d -, no by her 1 i nnty to ti e poor. Her maj 5stic form moved through the narrow nt city, and her bright bag up the most wretched ever lost i ts bright nor the heart its youthfi dgayety. She was a merry laugher inner* even, if the truth be spoken, still a bit of a, romp—ready for bo-peep and hide-a'od-seek, in the midst of a morning call, or at the end of a grave conversation. She e-bjov d sho -ingpiim young Quaker girls her orna- ments, plumes and satins, and telling th-m when she wore them; and, when in I .
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    j X. •f. •J-. X X SLAVERY AND THE WOMAN QUESTION" Lucretia Mott's Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 EDITED BY FREDERICK B. TOLLES, Ph.D. Author of " Meeting House and Counting House, the Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia " Supplement No. 23 to the Journal of the Friends' Historical Society Published jointly by FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION HAVERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA, U.S.A. (Obtainable at 302 Arch Street, Philadelphia 6, Pa. and the Friends Central Bureau, 1515 Cherry Street, Philadelphia 2, Pa.) and FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY FRIENDS HOUSE, EUSTON ROAD, LONDON, N.W.I '952 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HEADLEY BROTHERS LTD IOg KINGSWAY LONDON WC2 AND ASHFORD KENT Introduction WO women sat together just inside the entrance to the British Museum on a midsummer day in 1840. The Tyounger was about twenty-five years of age, short of stature, with coal-black ringlets falling about a rather full face. The other was a woman of middle age, petite in figure, with vivacious eyes and a determined chin ; her white cap, the plain bonnet on the bench beside her, her sober gown, with white kerchief across the shoulders, identified her as a member of the Society of Friends. They were engrossed in earnest conversation, oblivious to the treasures that lay about them in the world's greatest store-house of the past. From time to time, as their voices rose, a name or a phrase could be overheard : " the inward light . Elias Hicks . William Ellery Channing ... a religion of practical life .
    [Show full text]
  • Theses Digitisation: This Is a Digitised Version of the Original Print Thesis. Copyright and Moral
    https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] WOMEN OF THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT : THEIR IMPORTANCE IN THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH EDUCATION BY ROSALIND RUSSELL M.A., Dip.Ed., M.Ed. Thesis submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. The University of Glasgow DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW February, 1988 Copyright Rosalind Russell 1988 ProQuest Number: 10997952 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10997952 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
    [Show full text]
  • Open Research Online Oro.Open.Ac.Uk
    Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs The life and prose works of Amelia Opie (1769-1853) Thesis How to cite: Jones, Clive (2001). The life and prose works of Amelia Opie (1769-1853). PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2001 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000e347 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk 338 The Life and Prose Works of Amelia Opie (1769 - 1853) Contents: Volume H Appendices A. Amelia Opie's Eamingsfrom Longman's 339 ...... B. PublicationData of Opie's Works Published by Longman's 340 ....................................... C. AnnotatedRegister of the Lettersof Amelia Opie 341 ................................................ Bibliography 432 ................................................... 339 Appendix A: Amelia Opie's Earnings from Longman's, expressed in five-year segments 1801-1805 ;E357 4 5 1806-1810 E745 6 0 1811-1815 E990 15 4 1816-1820 E1331 0 11 1821-1825 E504 4 5 1826- 1830 E133 11 1 1831- 1838 E119 7 4 Thereare no recordsof paymentsfrom Longman'sto Opie (d. 1853)after 1838. This information is taken from Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, 'Women, Publishers and Money, 1790- 1820'in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture (East Lansing, Mich.: ColleaguesPress, 1987, no.
    [Show full text]
  • Letters from Cockney Lands. London: John Ebers … 1826
    JAUNTS AROUND LONDON 01. [AINSWORTH, William Harrison]. Letters from Cockney Lands. London: John Ebers … 1826. 8vo (174 × 111 mm), pp. [8], 93, [3]; some spotting to endleaves and edges, portion of upper margin of final two leaves torn away (no loss); uncut in the original publisher’s boards, printed spine label, spine a little chipped. £850 Scarce first edition of this lively poetical jaunt around London, an early work by the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882). ‘That the present Work should be offered anonymously to the public, must be ascribed to the Author’s unwillingness to forfeit his present relations with society, in which he might be considered a dangerous character, if known to be connected with the press as now conducted’ (Advertisement). These two lengthy verse epistles offer a fascinating ride through nineteenth-century London. Arrayed around topics including London squares, The City, club houses, McAdamizing and the Opera House, are satirical observations on the full gamut of life in the capital. Ainsworth makes passing references to poets including Byron and Swift, and attempts to determine whether English or foreign beauty is superior. 1826 was a busy year for Ainsworth: he moved from Manchester to London, was admitted to the King’s Bench, published his first novel, Sir John Chiverton, and entered into business with John Ebers (1778– 1858), the publisher here. An established publisher and manager of the Italian Opera House, Ebers introduced Ainsworth to literary and dramatic circles, as well as to his daughter Fanny, who would become Ainsworth’s wife. The newlyweds lived with Ebers for a time, but domestic and professional proximity proved too much and both the marriage and business partnership ended in separation.
    [Show full text]
  • A Journey in North America, Described in Familiar Letters to Amelia Opie
    Library of Congress A journey in North America, described in familiar letters to Amelia Opie. By Joseph John Gurney A JOURNEY IN NORTH AMERICA, DESCRIBED IN FAMILIAR LETTERS TO AMELIA OPIE. BY JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY. “He is a freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves beside.” Cowper. Not to be Reprinted IN PART OR WHOLE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION. NORWICH: PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION, BY JOSIAH FLETCHER. 1841. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1881 CITY OF WASHINGTON. E 165 G 98 A JOURNEY IN NORTH AMERICA. 309 59 LETTER I. Earlham, 1 st month, 18 th, 1841. My dear Friend, I am glad that I at length find myself at leisure to record some recollections of my late long and interesting visit to America. I propose to do so in the form of letters, and I avail myself of our old and intimate friendship, in freely addressing these letters, to thyself. Thou art aware that my journey was undertaken under the apprehension of religious duty. I left A journey in North America, described in familiar letters to Amelia Opie. By Joseph John Gurney http://www.loc.gov/resource/ lhbtn.26816 Library of Congress my own country and family, traversed the Atlantic, and continued nearly three years on the other side of it, partly in order to visit many of the meetings of the society of Friends in America, and partly for the purpose of preaching the gospel of Christ, so far as ability might be afforded me, to persons of every name and class. In the pursuit of these duties, I travelled through most of the states of the North American Union, as well as in Upper and Lower Canada.
    [Show full text]
  • Warwick.Ac.Uk/Lib-Publications Manuscript Version: Published
    Manuscript version: Published Version The version presented in WRAP is the published version (Version of Record). Persistent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/151124 How to cite: The repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing citation guidance from the publisher. Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher’s statement: Please refer to the repository item page, publisher’s statement section, for further information. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications 4 Radical Literary Women 4.1 Women’s Circles I have been arguing that there was a more plural and disjointed character to a great deal of London’s cultural and social life in the 1790s and 1800s than we often recognise. People had their social locations, defined in large part by family and status and by their own or their husband’s trade or profession.
    [Show full text]
  • Recent Scholarship in Quaker History
    FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Recent Scholarship in Quaker History Compiled in July 2015 This document is available at the Friends Historical Association website: http://www.haverford.edu/library/fha Angell, Stephen W. “Quaker Lobbying on Behalf of the New START Treaty in 2010: A Window into the World of the Friends Committee on National Legislation,” in Stanley D. Brunn, ed., The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices, and Politics, chapter 185, 3541- 3558. New York: Springer, 2015. Belcheff, David. Spinoza on the Spirit of Friendship. M.A. thesis, Arizona State University, 2014. Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) is most often treated as a secular philosopher in the literature. But the critical-historical and textual analyses explored in this study suggest that Spinoza wrote the Ethics not as a secular project intended to supersede monotheism for those stoic enough to plumb its icy depths, but rather, and as is much less often assumed, as a genuinely Judeo-Christian theological discourse accounting for the changing scientific worldviews and political realities of his time. This paper draws upon scholarship documenting Spinoza's involvement with Christian sects such as the Collegiants and Quakers. After establishing the largely unappreciated importance of Spinoza's religious or theological thought, a close reading of the Ethics demonstrates that friendship is the theme that ties together Spinoza's ethical, theological, political, and scientific doctrines. Bendler, Bruce A. "Discharging their Duty: Salem Quakers and Slavery, 1730-1780," in The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front, edited by James J. Gigantino II, 131-147.
    [Show full text]
  • Mary Brunton (1778-1718) by Ruth Facer
    Mary Brunton (1778-1718) by Ruth Facer Few readers today have heard of Mary Brunton. Although labelled ‘the forgotten Scottish novelist’ by Mary McKerrow in the title of her recent biography,[1] her work has not been entirely unknown. In her own time, in the words of her husband, Alexander Brunton, who wrote a full and touching Memoir of his wife, ‘they [her novels] rose very fast into celebrity, and their popularity seems to have as quickly sunk away.’[2] Contemporary criticism of Brunton’s fiction included some gentle ironic comments by Jane Austen in her letters, while her religious didacticism clearly appealed to early Victorian readers who were able to enjoy several further editions of her fiction between 1837 and 1852. Her first novel, Self-Control, was translated into French in 1829. In recent years her writing has been resurrected both in Britain and in the States. Her three works of fiction, Self-Control (1811), Discipline (1814), and Emmeline with some other pieces, (1819) were published in paperback in the late twentieth century, and are currently available on an internet website.[3] The daughter of an army officer, Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, and Frances Ligonier, sister of the second earl of Ligonier, Mary Brunton came from an upper class Scottish family. She was born on 1 November 1778 on Burray, Orkney. Her education was limited; according to her husband’s Memoir, her father had little leisure to teach her and her mother was more trained to ‘the accomplishments which adorn court, than to those which are useful in domestic life.’[4] However, her mother did teach her music, Italian and French, although when Mary was 16, ‘the charge of her father’s household devolved upon her’,[5] lasting for nearly four years.
    [Show full text]