Copyright by Katharine Elizabeth Beutner 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Katharine Elizabeth Beutner certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Writing for Pleasure or Necessity: Conflict among Literary Women, 1700-1750 Committee: ____________________________________ Lance Bertelsen, Supervisor ____________________________________ Janine Barchas ____________________________________ Elizabeth Cullingford ____________________________________ Margaret Ezell ____________________________________ Catherine Ingrassia Writing for Pleasure or Necessity: Conflict among Literary Women, 1700-1750 by Katharine Elizabeth Beutner, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Acknowledgments My thanks to the members of my dissertation committee—Janine Barchas, Elizabeth Cullingford, Margaret Ezell, and Catherine Ingrassia—for their wise and patient guidance as I completed this project. Thanks are also due to Elizabeth Hedrick, Michael Adams, Elizabeth Harris, Tom Cable, Samuel Baker, and Wayne Lesser for all the ways they’ve shaped my graduate career. Kathryn King, Patricia Hamilton, Jennie Batchelor, and Susan Carlile encouraged my studies of eighteenth-century women writers; Al Coppola graciously sent me a copy of his article on Eliza Haywood’s Works pre-publication. Thanks to Matthew Reilly for comments on an early version of the Manley material and to Jessica Kilgore for advice and good cheer. My final year of writing was supported by the Carolyn Lindley Cooley, Ph.D. Named PEO Scholar Award and by a Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. I want to express my gratitude to both organizations. I also want to acknowledge the English Department’s years of generosity, which included the Maureen Decherd Dissertation Fellowship in the spring of 2010, as well as support for my creative writing and teaching. Thanks also to my mother, Betsy Beyer, and my father, Edward Beutner (who would have been thrilled to call me Dr. Beutner, too). Thanks to Travis Brown for reading, listening to, and believing in my work. And finally, to Lance Bertelsen, advisor, dissertation director extraordinaire, and excellent human being: my profound gratitude for the great conversation we’ve been having since that first survey course in 2005. I would not have become the scholar I am without it. iv Writing for Pleasure or Necessity: Conflict among Literary Women, 1700-1750 Katharine Elizabeth Beutner, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Lance Bertelsen In this dissertation, I examine antagonistic relationships between women writers in the first half of the eighteenth century, focusing on the works of Delarivier Manley, Martha Fowke Sansom, Eliza Haywood, and Laetitia Pilkington. Professional rivalry among women writers represents an under-studied but vital element of the history of print culture in the early eighteenth century. I argue that the shared burden of negotiating the complicated literary marketplace did not, as critics have at times suggested, inspire women who wrote for print publication to feel for one another a sisterly benevolence. Rather, fine gradations in social class, questions of genre status and individual talent, and—perhaps most importantly—clashing literary ambitions spurred early eighteenth- century women writers into vicious rivalries recorded in print and driven by print culture. Women documented their literary battles in poems, in prefaces, and in autobiographical texts replete with self-justification and with attacks on former friends or disappointing patronesses. This dissertation recognizes rivalry as a crucial mode of interaction between v eighteenth-century literary women and analyzes the ways in which these professional women writers labored to defend themselves not just against patriarchal pressures but against one another. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of a more complete literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century by exploring how early eighteenth-century women writers imagined their own professional lives, how they imagined the professional lives of other women, and how they therefore believed themselves influenced (or claimed themselves influenced) by the support or detraction of other women. The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Delarivier Manley's career and writings, while the second two address the entangled writing lives of Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke Sansom. The concluding chapter briefly examines Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs. I investigate the way these women employed the practice of life-writing as a means of self-construction, self-promotion, and public appeal. vi Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: The Myth of the Cheerful Satirist……………………………………………29 Chapter 2: Delarivier Manley's Masks…………………………………………………...85 Chapter 3: Eliza Haywood, Martha Fowke Sansom, and the Spaces of Fame…………………………………………………………………162 Chapter 4: Gloatitia and the Scorpion: Reassessing the Haywood/Fowke Rivalry……………………………………………………….241 Conclusion: “A Tale for the Ladies”: Scandals, Memoirs, and Female Literary Celebrity………………………………………………………328 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….357 vii Introduction Delarivier Manley draws the distinction herself. In her infamous political scandal fiction the New Atalantis (1709), within a little-noticed narrative framing an interpolated poem by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Manley establishes a stark and surprisingly poignant opposition between women like the Countess who write for “pleasure” and women like herself who write out of “necessity” (New Atalantis [NA] 92).1 Finch's previously unpublished poem, entitled “The Progress of Life,” complains of life's disappointing downward course, lamenting, “How promising's the book of fate / Till thro'ly understood!” (NA 90)2 Though she clearly approves of the poem and its theme, Manley offers a critique of Finch's work in the voice of Astrea, one of the two deities touring Manley's allegorical England, whose name recalls Aphra Behn's poetic persona. Astrea suggests an alteration to one stanza of the poem, then concludes: I presume she's one of the happy few that write out of pleasure and not necessity. By that means it's her own fault, if she publish any thing but what's good, for it's next to impossible to write much and write well. (NA 93) Barred from considering herself one of the “real worthy” among the poets of her age by 1 Citations from Delarivier Manley, New Atalantis. Ed. Rosalind Ballaster. New York: Penguin, 1991. The complete title of the work, as published in 1709, is: Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. Written Originally in Italian. 2 Manley explains that Finch's poem had “met with abundance of applause,” presumably when circulated in manuscript (92). This poem was eventually published in a slightly altered form in Finch's Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions in 1713, printed by John Barber, Manley's business partner and lover (McGovern 108). Manley may have obtained copies of Finch's poems via Barber or Jonathan Swift, or may have been acquainted with Finch herself. 1 an awareness of her own artistic compromises, Manley defines herself against the elite tradition of female amateur writing of which Anne Finch was a part (60). This sense of division among women writers represents an understudied but vital element of the history of print culture in the early eighteenth century. Manley was not the only woman writing in the first decades of the eighteenth century to comprehend the distinction between women who wrote for pleasure and women who wrote out of necessity, nor the only one to publicly acknowledge her role as a writer for hire. But the shared burden of negotiating the complicated literary marketplace did not, as critics have at times suggested, inspire women who wrote for print publication to feel for one another a kind and sisterly beneficence.3 Fine gradations in social class, questions of genre status and individual talent, and—perhaps most importantly—clashing literary ambitions spurred early eighteenth-century women writers into vicious rivalries often recorded in print. Women documented their literary battles in poems, in prefaces, and in autobiographical texts replete with self-justification and with attacks on former friends or disappointing patronesses. The literary marketplace shaped their relationships, but their relationships also shaped the marketplace. To construct a more complete literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century, we must explore how early eighteenth-century women writers imagined their own professional lives, how they imagined the professional lives of other women, and how they believed themselves influenced (or claimed themselves 3 Margaret Ezell aptly explains the habit of treating earlier women writers as an extended “female literary family” with whom modern feminist critics can identify (Writing Women's Literary History 27). This desire for identification also seems to lead critics to interpret the records of relationships between literary women more positively than is justified by the available evidence. 2 influenced) by the support or detraction of other women.4 This study of conflict between literary women focuses on the works