Enlightenment Biographies

John Anderson (1726–96)

A Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, John Anderson dedicated himself to promoting women’s higher education. Born in Dumbartonshire, the son of devout Presbyterians (both his father and grandfather were ministers), Anderson demonstrated an early and persistent belief that women – contra popular theories of the period – were ‘rational beings’ and deserved every opportunity to ‘cultivate’ their understanding. This commitment culminated in a deathbed wish to found a coeducational technical university. In a detailed will, Anderson outlined a plan whereby ‘the ladies of Glasgow’ might be provided with ‘such a stock of general knowledge’ as to make them the ‘most cultivated in all of Europe’. His school would offer a ‘Ladies Course’ in Natural Philosophy where women, ‘for a small fee,’ would be introduced to a range of scientific subjects. Although Anderson did not live to see his dream realized, the school, aptly named Anderson’s Institution, was successfully established in 1796. As Anderson had requested, the Institution offered women courses in astronomy, electricity, magnetism, hydrostatics, hydraulics and optics. Thomas Garnett, one of the school’s early instructors, praised Anderson for his recognition that providing women with a better education was a necessary part of the ‘civilizing’ process. As Garnett wrote in his 1800 Observations on a Tour through the Highlands, ‘The ladies of this city are undoubtedly much indebted to the founder [Anderson], as being the first person in this island who set on foot a plan of rational education for them, which affords the means of acquiring knowledge, not only useful to themselves in various circumstances of life, and capable of always supplying a rational amusement, without the necessity of seeking it elsewhere; but which fits them for companions for the other sex, and puts them on a footing of equality in conversation.’ Arianne Chernock

Mary Astell (1666–?)

Mary Astell, a feminist avant la lettre and a philosopher, published eight polemical works in the service of women, conservative Tory politics, and the church of England; she also planned and raised the funds for a girls’ school in Chelsea, where she lived most of her life. Born into a family of coal hostmen in Newcastle in 1666, she was educated by her clergy- man uncle, Ralph Astell, who had been influenced by the ‘so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’ with whom he attended university. The Astell family fortunes declined when her father died, and sometime in 1689 or 1690, this remarkable, intellectual young woman went to London to seek patronage. Her philosophical correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton so affected him that he asked her if he might publish their correspondence. She agreed on the condition of her anonymity and that the volume of their letters (Letters Concerning the Love of God [1695]) be dedicated to Lady Catherine Jones, her lifelong friend and patron. Meanwhile, Astell published her first and most popular feminist tract, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), arguing for women’s intellectual equality and the necessity for their education; she proposed a retreat where women might pursue intellectual lives. In 1697 she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II, continuing several philosophical threads of her previ- ous work, and in 1700 Some Reflections Upon Marriage, about how marriage subordinated women to men. Thus Astell published her three most feminist works by 1700, and was satirized by Swift, plagiarized by Berkeley, and imitated by Defoe.

716 Enlightenment Biographies 717

In 1704 she opposed occasional conformity in Moderation truly Stated and A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, much admired by George Hickes and other non-jurors, and published the high church tract An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War In This Kingdom. Her The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705) was a philosophical rejoinder to Locke’s materialism and Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit (1709) a response to Shafesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. Astell was a feminist philosopher of the Enlightenment who championed women and published responses to the major thinkers of her day. She was supported ﬁnancially and psychologically by a coterie of aristocratic women who admired her mind and spirit. Ruth Perry

Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825)

Although often remembered simply as ‘Mrs. Barbauld’ the writer for children, Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin) was a woman of letters who earned renown as a poet, essayist, hymnist, political and religious pamphleteer, children’s author, reviewer, and editor. Her brother, John Aikin (1747–1822), a practicing physician and popular author in his own right, collaborated with her on a volume of prose pieces and on well-known works for children. In 1758 their father, Dr John Aikin, accepted a post at the Warrington Academy, which became the leading college for Dissenters. Among the tutors there were Joseph Priestley, Gilbert Wakefield, and William Enfield. Barbauld spent the most intensely productive period of her poetic career, between the ages of 22 and 31, at Warrington, culminating in her influential Poems (1773; reissued in expanded form in 1792). After her marriage in 1774 to Rochemont Barbauld, a French Protestant educated at Warrington, the couple moved to Palgrave, where Rochemont had been offered a Dissenting ministry. They lived there until 1785, sharing the management of a boarding school for boys. Following their resignation of the school and a tour of France, the Barbaulds settled in Hampstead, where they would remain until 1802. During these years Anna Barbauld engaged in the major political debates of the period: the movement to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts, the attempt to abolish the slave trade, and the debate over the French Revolution. The remainder of her life was spent in Stoke Newington, where her professional work continued unabated: she wrote for the new Annual Review; edited Richardson’s Correspondence (1804), Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder (1805), and The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (1807); edited and produced prefaces for the 50-volume collection The British Novelists (1810); and published her last major poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). Daniel White

Laura Bassi (1711–78)

Laura Bassi spent over forty-five years teaching physics at the University of Bologna. She might be described as the first woman to pursue a paid scientific career. The daughter of a lawyer, Bassi was initially tutored at home by the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi. She subsequently met other members of Bologna’s scholarly community who were equally impressed with her intellectual abilities. The archbishop of Bologna, Prospero Lambertini, encouraged Bassi’s patrons to propose her as a candidate for a university degree in philosophy. On 17 April 1732, Bassi publicly defended forty-nine philosophical theses; she received her laurea on 12 May – the second woman whose graduation we can document from any university. After the success of her degree, her supporters agreed to create a paid professorship at the University of Bologna, which Bassi accepted on 29 October 1732. She taught philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the university until her death in 1778, and subsequently held two other professorships – an appointment at the Collegio Montalto 718 Enlightenment Biographies and, as of 1776, a professorship in experimental physics at the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in Bologna. Bassi married the physician Giuseppe Veratti (1707–1793) in 1738. In addition to producing a household of eight children (five of whom survived infancy), they created an experimental household with an impressive physics cabinet. Bassi routinely taught students and visitors in their home. Celebrated throughout Europe for her accom- plishments, she enjoyed a cameo appearance in Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), and corresponded with such leading experimenters as the abbé Nollet, the physicist Alessandro Volta, and her cousin, the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who claimed he never would have become an experimenter if he had not studied with her. Paula Findlen

Mme LePrince de Beaumont (1711–80)

A teacher and prolific authoress, Jeanne-Marie LePrince was born in Rouen, Normandy, to a family of craftsmen specialising in ecclesiastical ornament. At 12 she entered an Ursuline convent near Rouen specialising in preparing girls to teach. In 1735 she went to Luneville, the court-city of the Duke of Lorraine, obtaining patronage from the Duchess-Regent Elisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans. She taught music and dancing to the duchess’ daughter, and in court circles. Gaining a pension in 1743 made her the target of a mercenary marriage proposal from Antoine Grimard de Beaumont, another patron’s raffish godson, which produced a daughter, Elisabeth. She annulled the marriage two years later, and began to write criticisms of natural religion and the libertine morality she believed to be its consequence, beginning with The Triumph of Truth (1748). The keynote of her books was a blending of austere Christian piety with modern rationalism, possibly inspired by Poulain de la Barre. She came to London in 1750 and successfully combined writing and running a school in London for young ladies, using contacts close to Frederick and Augusta, Prince and Princess of Wales. Her books include the series of dialogues and fables entitled in English The Young Misses Magazine (1759), The Young Ladies Magazine (1760), and Instructions for Young Ladies on their Entering into Life, Their Duties in the Married-State, and Towards their Children (1764). Civan, King of Bungo (1754) is an oriental conduct book for princes; later conduct fictions are Letters of Mme de Montier (1767) and Moral Tales (1776). In London she had an association, possibly a secret marriage, with Thomas Pichon, a Frenchman who had spied in Canada for the English, but left in 1763 with her daughter, who married an army surgeon serving in Savoy. The French remember her as the great-grand-mother of Prosper Merimée. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Eliza Berkeley (1734–1800)

Eliza Berkeley, née Frinsham, inherited a love of scholarship from her father, the Rev. Henry Frinsham, who encouraged her to learn Hebrew, Spanish and French. When he died in 1746 her attendance at Mrs Sheele’s school in Queen Square, London, came to an end, her mother believing that women should not be too learned if they were to ﬁnd husbands. In 1761 Eliza married the Reverend George Berkeley, son of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley and Ann (Forster) Berkeley, mystic and intellectual. Eliza and George had two sons, George Monck (1763–1793) and George Robert (1767–1775), to whose education they devoted themselves with zealous enthusiasm. Both sons predeceased their parents. The fullest source of biographical information available for Eliza Berkeley is her own extensive ‘Preface’ (630 pages) to her edition of her late son’s Poems (170 pages), which she edited for publication in 1797. This eccentric text is arguably more revealing of its author than its subject, the life and rather indifferent poetry of George Monck. Contemporary reviewers praised her anecdotal, if garrulous, style, placing her work in the context of the new and increasingly popular genre of biography. Like many women of her time, Berkeley deﬁned herself through her relationships with men, particularly her father, husband and Enlightenment Biographies 719 sons. However, her voluminous ‘Preface’ suggests a degree of resistance to her subordinate situation. After her husband’s death in 1795 she gathered his Sermons for publication in 1799. She also contributed several articles to the Gentleman’s Magazine, including ‘A Singular Tale of Love in High Life’ (August, 1796) which described her husband’s youthful courtship with bluestocking Catherine Talbot. Eliza Berkeley died at Kensington in 1800, aged 66. According to her wishes, her body was buried in Cheltenham, in the same tomb as her son George Monck. Elizabeth Eger

Inés Joyes y Blake (1731–1806)

Information about Inés Joyes y Blake is very scarce, as her life is still being researched. She was born in Madrid in 1731 to Gregorio Joyes and Inés Joyes, both members of Irish merchant dynasties established in Spain. She belonged to the middle class, with commercial, financial, bureaucratic and military connections. Her family seems to have been a cultured one, connected with Enlightenment circles (her refined home was praised by English travellers, while one of her sons, Joaquín, and her grandson José played significant intellectual and political roles in the period of liberal revolution in early nineteenth-century Spain). She married another Irishman, Agustín Blake, in 1752, and lived all her adult life in Málaga, a flourishing sea-port, and in Vélez-Málaga, a small provincial town. She had nine children, for whom she had to provide after her husband’s banckruptcy and death in 1782. Her name appeared in the world of letters with a 1798 translation of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, followed by an Apology of women, which seems to have gone rather unnoticed in her time.. The fact that the Irish in Spain were a compact community, inclined to maintaining their language and customs, accounts for endogamy and also explains her rather unusual mastery of the English language. Her decision to translate a philosophical novel – written by a defender of the talents of women and friend to many women writers, a novel which was sceptical about matrimony and had a heroine with a singular personality – rather than one of the sentimental plots then in vogue, is an indica- tion of her leanings. Inés Joyes’ ideas are further developed in her Apology, a vehement plea for women’s intellectual aptitudes, moral responsibilities and emotional autonomy, with obvious connections to the work of Josefa Amar and more intriguing parallels with that of Mary Wollstonecraft. Monica Bolufer

Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–?)

Borbon was an enlightened Spanish woman. Her date of death is uncertain, but it was not before 1808. Descended on both sides from families of a certain intellectual renown and social standing (both her father and grandfather were distinguished physicians), she lived at the court as a young woman. Later, she married a lawyer, Joaquín Fuertes Piquer, had one son and spent most of her adult life in Zaragoza, a provincial town whose reformist and Enlightened circles she and her husband joined. Her education was rather uncommon for a non-aristocratic woman of the day. She learnt Latin, Greek, and several modern languages; and she gained considerable knowledge of the Classics, of Spanish moralistic and pedagogical writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of eighteenth-century educational works, and, most particularly, of ancient and modern medical texts. Her writings include translations of agronomic, literary, erudite and pedagogical works from the English, French and Italian. However, her most relevant publications are her Discourse in Defense of the Talents of Women (Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres, 1786), written as a contribution to the debate concerning women’s admission to the Economic Society of Madrid, and her Discourse on women’s physical and moral education (Discurso sobre la educa- ción física y moral de las mujeres, 1790), the most comprehensive pedagogical treatise for 720 Enlightenment Biographies women in eighteenth-century Spain. She enjoyed considerable prestige in her time. She was admitted to the Economic Society of Aragón in 1782, to the Junta de Damas (Ladies’ Committee) of the Economic Society of Madrid in 1787, and to the Royal Medical Society of Barcelona, in recognition of her contribution to the popularization of medical knowledge. Monica Bolufer

Frances Evelyn Boscawen (1719–1805)

Frances Evelyn (née Glanville), was the great-niece, on her mother’s side, of the diarist John Evelyn, whose literary skill and love of nature she inherited. She married Edward Boscawen in 1742. The union was marked by long periods of separation while Edward was engaged in naval battles overseas. Frances oversaw the building of their ﬁne country mansion, Hatchlands in Surrey, designed by the architect Robert Adam. The Admiral died in 1761 after a distinguished career in North America and in the Seven Years War against France. Together they had ﬁve children, three of whom predeceased Frances. While her long widowhood was marked by much personal sorrow, it was also the most sociable period of her life. Frances acted as a muse and patron to several writers, including Edward Young, who dedicated his poem ‘Resignation’ (1761) to her, aiming to console her on her husband’s death. She hosted popular assemblies at her London house – her guests included Elizabeth Montagu, Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua and Frances Reynolds, Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. She was widely known as a model letter- writer, prized for her wit, elegance and warm heart. More compared her to Madame Sévigné and eulogized her social virtues in her poem ‘Sensibility’ (1782). She also praised Boscawen alongside Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu in her poem ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation’ (1786), which celebrates the intellectual values of the bluestocking community. Frances died in London on 26 February, 1805. At her request, she was laid in her husband’s tomb in the church of St. Michael Pinkivel, Cornwall. While her copious correspondence remains in family hands, some of her letters have been published in collections of bluestocking correspondence. Elizabeth Eger

Edmund Burke (1729–97)

Edmund Burke was a parliamentary politician and philosopher. He was born in Ireland of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, but himself identified as Protestant, although sympathetic to Catholic claims. Upon moving to England, his political and intellectual talents attracted the patronage of influential men such as the Marquis of Rockingham. In 1757, he published A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which identified the sublime as masculine and the beautiful as feminine. Although Burke is now thought of as the father of modern conservatism, for most of his political career he sided with the Rockingham Whigs, who criticized what they saw as the overweening power of the King, and wished to strengthen the power of Parliament. In 1770 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents to address this issue. Burke believed that George III was unconstitutionally advised by a secret cabinet, including his mother, which deprived the Parliament of its due voice. Because of his suspicion of royal power, Burke feared the supposed secret influence of the king’s mother, and later, in the Regency Crisis of 1788, of his wife the queen. The Whigs identified with the heritage of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but they still believed that the descendents of the old aristocratic families who led that revolution were the natural leaders of society. As a Whig, Edmund Burke was not sympathetic to calls for expanding the parliamentary franchise. When the French revolution broke out in 1789, Burke turned against his former Whig allies and wrote his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France against it. Featuring most Enlightenment Biographies 721 prominently was the dazzling vision of Marie Antoinette and the call for chivalry, but Burke squarely based his political philosophy on inherited traditions, family patrimonies and natural subordination. Anna Clark

Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808)

Cabanis, a French physician and social theorist, was born in Cosnac in 1757 and died in Rueil in 1808. After serving in his youth as secretary to prince-bishop Massalski of Vilna, Cabanis moved to Paris in 1775, where he studied medicine with the Royal physician J-B-Léon Dubreuil while also cultivating letters; over the course of his life, he translated fragments of the Iliad and works by Meissner, Goethe, and Gray. In 1778, Cabanis settled in Auteuil and soon became the protégé of Mme Helvétius, who oversaw an intellectually vibrant salon where Cabanis made the acquaintance of numerous philosophes, writers and political figures – including Mirabeau, who employed Cabanis as both speechwriter and physician. Cabanis was politically active in the Revolutionary era: he advocated hospital reforms, universal primary education, national public assistance, and standards for the medical profession. During the violence of the Terror, Cabanis prepared poison for his friends (including the vial which Condorcet consumed to avoid execution) and confined himself to Auteuil. After Thermidor, he assumed a leading role in the reconstruction of France’s cultural and educational institutions, serving as deputy in the Council of Five Hundred, conspirator in Bonaparte’s coup of Brumaire (November 1799), and a professor of clinical medicine, legal medicine and history of medicine at the Paris School of Medicine (although it is doubtful that Cabanis actually taught). On May 14 1796, he married Charlotte-Félicité de Grouchy, Condorcet’s sister-in-law. That same year, he entered the French National Institute, where he was reunited with fellow ‘Ideologues’ who seconded his effort to produce a ‘science of man’ that clearly articulated the links between physiology, psychology and intelligence. It was there, from 1796 to 1800, that Cabanis read the twelve Memoirs that constituted his major work, Les Rapports du physique et moral de l’homme (1802). In the Rapports, Cabanis posited that physical sensitivity is the simple, gen- erative principle not just of physiology but also of man’s moral and intellectual life; he then proceeded to analyse this principle in all its fixed and variable aspects – including that of sex, which Cabanis described as exerting a profound influence on the character of ideas and moral affections. After his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1808, Cabanis was buried in the Pantheon. Anne Vila

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–74).

Margaret Cavendish was born in Colchester, the daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas. In 1642 she became a maid of honour at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she accompa- nied into exile in 1644. During her exile in France, she met and married William, Earl of Newcastle. Thereafter she lived with her husband in France and the Netherlands. When she returned to England at the Restoration, her intellectual profile and highly colourful public persona gave her a reputation for eccentricity which haunts her memory to this day. Margaret Cavendish was a prolific writer whose wide-ranging interests extended from drama and poetry to philosophy and science. She was one of the first English women to publish in these areas. Her pursuit of philosophy in particular was a major achievement at a time when very few women had the opportunity to develop an interest in the subject. Through her husband and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, she had contact with some of the leading thinkers of her time, including Huygens, Hobbes, Descartes, Sir Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton. In 1667 she received recognition of a sort when she was 722 Enlightenment Biographies invited to visit the Royal Society. Nevertheless , as a woman, she was not permitted to join the society. Initially Cavendish’s preferred medium was verse – Poems and Fancies (1654) and Philo- sophical and Physical Opinions (1654). But she subsequently adopted a more systematic mode for setting out her philosophy especially in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), where she proposed a vitalistic and materialist account of nature. She asserted the distinctiveness of her position by critiquing contemporary thinkers in several writings: Philosophical Letters (1664) is a series of epistolary essays addressed to an imaginary female correspondent which argue against Hobbes, Descartes, Jan Baptiste van Helmont and Henry More; Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) attacks the experimental science of the Royal Society; and A Description of a New World Called the Blazing World, published with the latter, is a fictional utopia in which she satirises contemporary science and philosophy. She also published collections of plays (1662 and 1668), and semi-discursive prose writings – The World’s Olio (1655), Orations (1662), and Sociable Letters (1664) – and a Life of her husband (1667). Sarah Hutton

Mme du Châtelet (1706–49)

Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born into a well-connected noble family; both parents maintained a Paris salon. Her father taught her Italian; she was also tutored in mathematics, science, English and Latin. At nineteen she married Florent Claude, Marquis de Châtelet, from an ancient military noble family. Their main estate was at Cirey in Champagne, near the duchy of Lorraine whose ruler, Stanislas, the former king of Poland, was Louis XV’s father-in-law. Mme du Châtelet always combined her intellectual pursuits with an intense social life at the courts of Nancy and Versailles, including private theatri- cals and gambling. She loved dress and jewels, and with Voltaire’s help redecorated parts of Cirey in rococo taste combined with modern luxury. In the first seven years of her marriage the marquise combined bearing three children with the life of a salonnière; in keeping with elite mores she had several liaisons, including one with the statesman, the duc de Richelieu, and the scientist Maupertuis, who also tutored her in advanced mathematics. After 1734 she and Voltaire became acknowledged partners, a situation accepted by her husband; at Cirey they wrote, studied, acted, and negotiated the complex literary quarrels which reflected the cultural politics and personal animosities of the era. As a philosophe she mediated both English and German thought into French. Her most significant achievement were the translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, with a commentary assisted by the mathematicians A.-C. Clairaut and D. Bernouilli, (1759); and her synthesis of Leibniz and Newton, in Les Institutions physiques (1740, in the form of letters to her son). She deepened Voltaire’s interest in science and influenced his Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton. Her translation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, was prefaced with her advocacy of feminist possibilities in the arts and sciences. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94)

Mathematician, philosopher, feminist, and revolutionary activist, Marie-Jean-Antoine- Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was born into a noble family in Picardy in 1743. As a young protégé of Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Condorcet did innovative work on calculus that won him entry into the Academy of Sciences by 1769. He became a Physiocrat and supporter of Turgot’s reforms, served as Inspector-General of the Mint, and wrote pamphlets backing free trade, praising American political innovations, and criticizing the political disenfranchisement of women (in Letters from a Bourgeois of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia, 1787). Well known for his éloges of fellow philosophes, he also made his name by Enlightenment Biographies 723 developing a “social arithmetic” that attempted to apply the science of probability to social problems (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, 1785). He and his wife, Sophie de Grouchy, ran one of Paris’s most prominent salons. During the French Revolution, he became a deputy to the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. A prominent advocate of humanitarian causes, he argued for the abolition of slavery, opposed the death penalty, and drafted an influential proposal for a national, secular education system. His controversial work, On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790), lobbied for political rights and educational opportunities for women. As a republican deputy, he authored the Girondin proposal for the Constitution of 1793. Denounced for his connections with the Girondins, Condorcet fled Paris and was eventually arrested. In hiding and in prison, he wrote his most well-known work, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), which examined the stages of human progress in language and knowledge and predicted the perfectibility of humankind in a tenth and final stage. Still in prison in late March 1794, he committed suicide. Suzanne Desan

Thomas Cooper (1759–1840)

Thomas Cooper, physician and activist, was a man with keen democratic instincts. Committee member of the ‘Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade,’ leader in Dissenting circles and active member of both the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and Manchester Constitutional Society, Cooper publicized his strong pro-Woman views during an ardent political exchange with the conservative M.P. Edmund Burke regarding the course of the French Revolution. In his 1792 A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective, written in response to a particularly nasty speech delivered by Burke in the House of Commons, in which Burke had chastised Cooper for traveling to France on behalf of the Manchester Constitutional Society, Cooper argued that all those capable of ‘self-direction’ – women included – had a right to the basic liberties advocated by the French revolutionaries. ‘I have repeatedly considered the subject of the Rights of Women,’ Cooper wrote, ‘and I am perfectly unable to suggest any Argument in support of the political Superiority so generally arrogated by the Male Sex, which will not equally apply to any System of Despotism of Man over Man.’ Cooper’s statement attracted considerable attention, and was reprinted in the essays of British writers Thomas Starling Norgate and John Bristed, as well as in an American article entitled ‘On the Rights of Woman’, published in the National Magazine in 1800. In 1794, Cooper followed Joseph Priestley to America, where he lobbied against John Adams’ administration and taught mineralogy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually becoming President of South Carolina College in 1820. Arianne Chernock

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802)

Erasmus Darwin was a physician, botanist and poet who played a central role in the forma- tion of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The Society, whose members included Joseph Priestley, Thomas Day, Robert Bage and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, took a strong interest in improving female education – at least 11 of its members wrote pro-Woman educational treatises – and Darwin himself was the author of A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), written to support his two illegitimate daughters who had recently opened a boarding school in Derbyshire. In the plan, Darwin chastised parents of the ‘last half century’ for not taking enough pains to educate their daughters: ‘Hence it happens, that female education has not yet been reduced to a perfect system.’ To create this ‘perfect system’, Darwin recommended that young women be instructed not only in ‘grammar, languages, and common arithmetic’, but also in ‘geography, civil history, and 724 Enlightenment Biographies natural history’, as well as in botany and chemistry. He also encouraged teachers to engage their female students in regular physical activity. The Plan was generally well-received, although John Aikin complained in The Monthly Review that Darwin had ‘done no more than slightly touch on a few leading ideas’. Female education, however, was only one of Darwin’s many causes. Overweight and sybaritic, this wide-ranging thinker (who fathered fourteen children) was also deeply committed to liberating eros. His poem The Botanic Garden (1791), which publicized the Linnaean system of classiﬁcation, cited the poly- gamous practices of plants as a means of legitimating sexual freedoms for both men and women. As Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, once observed, love was ‘the purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life’. Arianne Chernock

Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761)

Laura Bentivoglio Davia was one of many aristocratic women engaged in the pursuit of knowledge in eighteenth-century Italy. She is noteworthy primarily for her relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze in the first half of the eighteenth century. The last direct descendant, along with her sister, of the Bentivoglio family that ruled the city of Bologna prior to its annexation by the Papal States, Bentivoglio married Francesco Davia in 1708. Marital difficulties lead to a lengthy separation between 1715 and 1726. For the majority of this period, she lived with her husband’s uncle, cardinal Giovan Antonio Davia, in his bish- opric in Rimini. There she developed a serious interest in scientific and philosophical pursuits by participating in cardinal Davia’s scientific academy and being educated in modern philosophy by the Riminese physician Giovanni Bianchi. In 1723 Francesco Maria Zanotti, the secretary of the Istituto delle Scienze, called her the bella Cartesiana (beautiful Cartesian) in recognition of her prominent social role in the cardinal’s academy as its sole female member. In the decades following her return to Bologna, Bentivoglio Davia continued to perfect her scientific and mathematical education; she also played an important role as a patron of local scientific figures such as Zanotti, Bianchi, and even the young Francesco Algarotti whose Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) she eagerly read. While she initially disapproved of the idea of Laura Bassi taking up a university professorship in 1732, she eventually became a patron and supporter of this younger woman physicist. Like many women of her generation, Bentivoglio Davia left behind no published writings in relation to her scientific interests. She was primarily a consumer of the knowledge of her time, albeit a very interesting and opinionated one judging by her extant correspondence. Paula Findlen

Thomas Day (1748–89)

Thomas Day was one of the most respected Rousseauian theorists and social reformers of the late British Enlightenment, whose didactic children’s book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) was praised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the pages of the Analytical Review for its pro-Woman content. In her review, Wollstonecraft cited Day’s eagerness to see women treated as ‘rational creatures’ rather than as ‘polished playthings’ and commended his efforts to promote ‘a very different mode of education for females, from that which some late writers on the subject, have adopted’. Day’s attitude towards women, however, was by no means straightforward, and this ‘studiously unkempt’ philosopher’s personal life at times suggests a far more complicated relationship to the opposite sex. After conducting an unsuccessful search for a British ‘Sophie’ – a woman who might favor the ‘natural’ over the ‘artiﬁcial’ – Day adopted two young girls and raised them along Rousseauist lines in hopes of transforming them into ideal wifely material. The project failed. One of the girls proved ‘invincibly stupid’. The other, Sabrina Sidney, though beautiful, also lacked Enlightenment Biographies 725

‘strength of mind’. As the Lichfield poet Anna Seward reported of the affair, Day disliked the way that Sidney responded to his experiments, particularly the fact that she screamed when ‘melted-sealing wax’ was dropped on her arms and jumped when pistols were fired at her petticoats. In the end, Day and Sidney parted ways – she heading off to a boarding school and becoming the wife of one Mr. Bicknel (a barrister who had been with Day when he first selected his orphans) and he marrying Miss Esther Milnes, a woman who, in the words of Day’s good friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth, combined ‘in an unusual manner, independence of sentiment, and the most complete matrimonial obedience’. Arianne Chernock

Denis Diderot (1713–84)

Denis Diderot, philosopher, novelist, and editor of the Encyclopédie, was one of the central ﬁgures of the French Enlightenment. Educated at a Jesuit College in Langres and at the Catholic Collège d’Harcourt in Paris, he was destined for the priesthood. In 1732, however he renounced the religious life thereafter subsisting on a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris by tutoring in history and mathematics and writing sermons to order. In 1743, Diderot married, against his father’s strong opposition, a seamstress and lace-maker, Anne- Antoinette Champion, by whom he had several children, but only one, a daughter to whom he was devoted, surviving into adult-hood. His marriage, intellectually less than compatible, was not happy. Engaging in a number of extra-marital affairs, Diderot’s long relationship with his mistress, Sophie de Volland, is notable for the fascinating correspondence to which it gave rise. Diderot was at the centre of the philosophes circle, a friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert and Grimm. In 1746 he and d’Alembert began work on the vast Encyclopédie, which given strict French censorship, had a chequered and protracted publishing history. In 1749 Diderot’s writings on natural religion and materialism, as well as his pornographic novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets led to his imprisonment at Vincennes for several months. As well as the Encyclopédie, he wrote widely on art criticism, in his Salons, and on the theatre, developing an important theory of naturalistic acting. His stage plays, Le Père de famille (1758), Le Fils naturel (1757) were dramas of sentiment based on family affections. His letters to the actress Marie Madeleine Jodin, who became his protégée, expound his theories on acting also developed in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (The Actor’s Paradox, 1773). In same year he undertook a trip to Russia, to visit his patroness, Catherine II, who had made him her librarian and who gave him a generous pension. A polymath and an enormously fertile mind, interested in everything, he combined enormous erudi- tion with wit and lightness of touch. Many of his most daring and speculative writings such as Le rêve d’Alembert and Jaques le fataliste were not published in his lifetime. A convinced materialist, Diderot anticipated theories of evolution. He was one of the most brilliant and engaging of Enlightenment philosophes. Felicia Gordon

William Enﬁeld (1741–97)

William Enfield served alternately as an instructor and rector at the Dissenting Warrington Academy, minister at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, and essayist for various left-leaning periodicals. Throughout his varied career as a teacher, preacher and writer, he channeled much of his energy into fighting for sexual equality. In book reviews written for The Monthly Magazine and The Monthly Review, he touted Woman’s abilities, encouraging Man to treat her as his intellectual equal. Perhaps Enfield’s most intriguing assertion, however, was that a new term was needed to describe the human species in toto. Assessing Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he noted that he disliked the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’, feeling that they were designations that emphasized the differences between the sexes, rather than their overwhelming commonalities: ‘Both men and women 726 Enlightenment Biographies should certainly, in the first place, regard themselves, and should be treated by each other, as human beings. It might, perhaps, in some measure, contribute to this end, if, beside the sexual appellations of man and woman, we had some general term to denote the species, like… Homo in the Greek and Roman languages. The want of such a general term is a material defect in our language.’ Yes, there were biological distinctions, he explained, but most of the perceived differences stemmed less from physiology than from cultural context. It was his aim, he noted, as an enlightened subject, to minimize the gap between the sexes (though not in such a way, he insisted, as to completely ‘confound’ difference). Enfield himself was no doubt working in this spirit when he decided – likely playfully – to use the pseudonym ‘Homo’ in the essays he wrote for the radical Norwich periodical The Cabinet. Arianne Chernock

Louise-Florence-Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles de la Live d’Épinay (1726–83)

Though she married for love, Louise d’Épinay soon discovered that she had made a disastrous marriage to her profligate tax-farmer cousin, La Live d’Épinay. Best known for her association with the philosophes, in particular Diderot, Grimm (who was her lover) and the abbé Galiani, with whom she corresponded extensively after his return to Naples in 1769, she was herself a distinguished member of the intellectual society in which she moved. She contributed anonymously to Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, taking charge of its production for lengthy periods when he was away. She was also closely acquainted with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom she famously quarrelled. She wrote up her version of events in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, often referred to as her Pseudo-Mémoires, which was published for the first time in 1818. Her pedagogical work, Les Conversations d’Émilie (1774, augmented and corrected in 1782) demonstrates the influence of Rousseau, while at the same time criticising him in the area of the education of women. Written for her grand-daughter, Émilie de Belzunce, Les Conversations d’Émilie was awarded the Prix Montyon (a newly established prize offered by the Académie française for the book of the year judged to be the most useful to society) in January 1783. She was in competition for this with Mme de Genlis, who clearly considered that her own pedagogical novel Adèle et Théodore deserved to win. It was suggested at the time that Genlis’s known anti- philosophe stance spoiled her chances. Mme d’Épinay’s educational theory designated three developmental stages: (i) up to ten, (ii) from ten till fourteen or fifteen, (iii) from fifteen till marriage. The published work covers only education up to ten. Jean Bloch

Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764)

Feijoo was a Benedictine monk, the eldest son of a family of the lesser nobility, and a Theology professor at the University of Oviedo for almost half a century (1710–59). He was one of the most popular Spanish writers of the eighteenth century, and an energetic advocate of Enlightenment principles. He opposed defenders of traditional scholasticism and was an admirer of modern European philosophy. For a long time, he has been presented by historians as an exceptional figure, heroically standing alone in a landscape of mediocrity and backwardness. Recent research offers a more nuanced version of enlightened change, pointing to its origins in the last third of the seventeenth century, and reassessing Feijoo’s significance instead as the most relevant representative of the early Spanish Enlightenment, given his wide range of interests and his determination to reach a large audience. His most important works – two collections of essays entitled Critical Theater of Common Errors and Prejudices (Teatro Crítico de Errores Comunes) and Erudite Letters (Cartas Eruditas) – attained an unprecedented popularity in the rather bleak outlook of Spanish editorial industry. They Enlightenment Biographies 727 went through, respectively, twenty and eleven full or partial editions between 1725 and 1787, as well as dozens of reprints. At the moment of Feijoo’s death, almost 500,000 copies had been sold, and dictionaries and indexes of his work had been published to help quick browsing. He was also one of the Spanish intellectuals most famous abroad, with translations into five languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, German and English.) His Defense of women (essay XVI of his Critical Theater) aroused intense and longlasting polemics and had a strong influence on eighteenth-century Spanish culture. Monica Bolufer

Mme de la Fite (1737–94)

Marie Elisabeth de la Fite, author, translator and governess, belonged to the sector of northern European Republic of Letters which was moderate, Protestant, Enlightened, and pursued the Baconian and Newtonian goal of demonstrating the compatibility of theology and natural philosophy. She was born in Hamburg (or Altona), possibly of French Huguenot stock. She married a Dutch Huguenot pastor, Jean-Daniel La Fite, who was also a Chaplain to the House of Orange in The Hague; both were involved in educating the royal children. She also collaborated with him in the Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux Arts, an explicitly anti-Deistic journal, also devoted to the advancement of the arts and sciences. After being widowed she joined the household of Queen Charlotte in Britain in 1781, as a Reader, and instructress to the princesses in German and French. She also helped Sarah Trimmer with the Queen’s charity schools in Windsor. Her educational works, written with the royal princesses in mind, include Eugénie et ses élèves,(1787) dedicated to Princess Elizabeth, and Entretiens, Drames, et Contes Moraux à l’usage des femmes,(1801) dedicated to Queen Charlotte. These were modelled on similar works by Mme LePrince de Beaumont, and as well as dialogues on natural history include playlets by progressive continental educators such as Armand Berquin, C. F. Weisse, C. G. Salzmann and J.H. Campe, many of whom were inﬂuenced by English moral writers. (Mary Wollstonecraft in turn translated Salzmann). She cherished her literary friendship with Mme de Genlis. Her moral themes include the need to override passion with reason, to cultivate rural simplicity rather than metropolitan sophistication, and enjoy the pleasures of philanthropy. She also translated Lady Sophia Sternheim, by Sophie von La Roche, Thoughts on the Manners of the Great by Hannah More and two works by Lavater, the founder of physiognomy. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Eliza Fletcher (1770–1858)

Eliza Fletcher, née Eliza Dawson, was the daughter of Elizabeth Hill, from a Yorkshire gentry family, who died at her birth, and Miles Dawson, a surveyor and small landowner. Educated at the Manor School, York, in July 1791 she married the Scottish advocate Archibald Fletcher, a Gaelic speaker and burgh reformer, made Edinburgh her home. From then until her husband’s death in 1828 she remained close to the reforming politics of Edinburgh Whiggism, and her autobiography is an outstanding account of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary and reforming circles. She shared and celebrated her husband’s political sympathies with the early principles of the French Revolution, though not with more radical revolutionary politics, and she wrote of the strength of Tory prejudice against reformers in Edinburgh in the 1790s. Her attractive personality and political interests allowed her to play a lively role in the circles surrounding the Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802. With Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant of Laggan, she helped to provide the sociable and conversational contexts in which men such as Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Dugald Stewart and many others flourished. Her autobiography also identifies the close connections between a network of literary women which included Hamilton, Grant, Joanna Baillie, Margaret Cullen, Mary Brunton, and the English 728 Enlightenment Biographies dissenters Anna Barbauld and Catherine Cappe. Their common interests included the education of women, and philanthropic activities, especially in Edinburgh. After 1828 she spent less time in Scotland, but still celebrated the passing of the Reform Act for Scotland in Edinburgh in 1832. Most of her later years were spent in the English Lake District, but throughout her long life she maintained active political interests, notably in the politics of European nationalism; she corresponded with Mazzini until 1853. She had four daughters, two sons and many grandchildren. Her daughter Mary, Lady Richardson (1802–80) edited her autobiography, most of which was written between 1838 and 1844, with additional correspondence, privately printed at first, in 1874. Jane Rendall

William Frend (1757–1841)

William Frend was the son of an Anglican wine merchant who sent him to North America to learn the trade at the outbreak of the American rebellion. Frend was drafted into and served in the British army. On his return to England he refused either a mercantile or a military career, determined to prepare for the ministry. He took a degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where William Paley (1743–1805) inﬂuenced him. Frend became Tutor in Mathematics at Jesus College; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Malthus were among his students. He renounced his prospects as an Anglican by confessing Unitarianism in 1787, and resigned his livings. In 1788 he published two provocative texts, Thoughts on Subscription to Religious Tests and An Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge and its Neighbourhood, exhorting them to turn from the false worship of Three Persons to the worship of One True God, then left to tour the Continent, although he retained his tutorship with a stipend of £150 per annum. On his return to Cambridge, Frend resumed his duties as a tutor; he also collaborated with Joseph Priestley on a new translation of the Scriptures, and Robert Robinson’s researches for his History of Baptism (1790) by securing manuscripts for him from the University libraries. Frend published Peace and Union recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans in February 1793, in which he attacked the ‘Church of England [as] a political institution’. He was tried by the University and banished on grounds that his judges knew were without statutory basis, and so kept his stipend. He moved to London in 1794 where he worked as a freelance tutor in Mathematics while continuing radical activities with other Unitarians and political progressives; later, he participated in the agitation for the Reform Bill of 1832. In 1807, Frend accepted a regular position as actuary at the newly formed Rock Life Assurance Company. Frend demonstrated a lifelong interest in education, including for women. He encouraged his frail half- sister in her studies, supported Mary Hays in her intellectual ambitions, tutored Annabella Milbanke, later the unhappy wife of Lord Byron, in Latin and Mathematics; after his marriage to Sara Blackburne, the granddaughter of Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, in 1808, he served as mentor to the ﬁrst of their seven children, Sophia, teaching her reading, writing, Hebrew, philosophy, and taking her with him everywhere. Gina Luria Walker

Mme de Genlis (1747–1830)

Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin came from an old but not wealthy aristocratic family in Burgundy, and married the well-connected soldier Charles-Alexis, Comte de Genlis, in 1763. She was educated at a convent, followed by self-education with the help of salon friends. Through family connections she became lady-in-waiting to the duchesse d’Orléans, whose husband was a cousin of Louis XVI, and heir to the throne, until Louis produced children. She had a brief liaison with the duc; her adopted daughter Pamela, later wife of the Irish rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was widely, but almost certainly erroneously, believed to be their daughter. In 1779 she became Gouvernante to the Orléans’ sons and Enlightenment Biographies 729 daughters. As an educator she imitated Mme Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, by writing children’s plays. A prolific author, her two most influential books, read and translated across Europe, were Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation, (1782), in which a virtuous couple retire to the country to educate their children, and exchange letters with friends including one who is educating a prince; and the anthology of stories, Les Veillées du Château (Evenings at the Castle,1784), including ‘Alphonse and Dalinda’, where the marvels of science surpass folklore magic. De Genlis believed religion was the foundation of morality, though religion in a benevolent and social rather than a doctrinal and sacramental sense; this put her at odds with philosophes such as D’Alembert and Rousseau. Her educational philosophy included science, history, geography and modern languages for both sexes. Her influence over the duc’s politics in the French Revolution was overestimated. She spent 1791–1800 abroad, supporting herself by writing, and in 1800 made her accommoda- tion with Napoleon. Always a constitutional monarchist, she remained socially conservative. Her great ambition for her pupil Louis-Philippe to become king was realised in 1830. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699–1777)

Born in Paris and orphaned young, she was married off at fourteen with a substantial dowry to the wealthy director of the royal glassworks at Saint-Gobain. Although she had been pious in her childhood and youth, she became less so in her twenties, when her intellectual curiosity developed. She began to frequent the salon of her neighbour Mme de Tencin, where she became a regular until the death of her mentor (and of her own husband) in 1749. Before that time she had already begun her own salons: one on Mondays for artists and amateurs of art, the other on Wednesdays for men of letters. She was an important patron of artists and men of letters, known for her generosity to both. She was not a writer and published nothing. Her correspondence with Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, whom she considered her adopted son, has been published. Dena Goodman

William Godwin (1756–1836)

William Godwin was born in Suffolk, into a family steeped in religious dissent. His paternal grandfather, father and uncle were all dissenting ministers, and in 1767 Godwin followed them, beginning his training with a Norwich Independent, and then moving on to the Hoxton Academy from which he graduated in 1778. He practised as a minister for several years, in Suffolk and London, until his religious views became too heterodox for his con- gregations and he turned to writing instead. His early years as a literary professional were precarious, generating so little income that he often had difficulty feeding himself; but in the mid-1780s he gained a post on the New Annual Register that afforded him a modicum of economic security. He held this post for seven years, during which time he became a fixture on the London literary scene, and thus was well positioned to join the debate that broke out following the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). His contribution to this debate, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) – a weighty statement of anarcho-individualist principles – won him great renown, and brought him to the centre of the fierce political conflicts of the day. His next major work, Things as They Are – or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), an extraordinary exploration of the psychological effects of injustice and inequality, heightened his reputation further. In 1794 he published Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury (1794), a very effective attack on the charge of High Treason directed against his friend Thomas Holcroft and other leading radicals of the day. In 1796 he became Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover and then–following her pregnancy with the future Mary Shelley – her husband. Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth left him desolate, and his remarriage – to 730 Enlightenment Biographies

Jane Clairmont in 1801 – was not emotionally successful. In 1798 he published a very revealing memoir of Wollstonecraft which badly tarnished both her and his public status, and from this point on his reputation went steadily downhill. None of his succeeding works brought him much success, and his ﬁnances – despite the assistance of his son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley – became increasingly precarious. Several personal tragedies darkened his life further. In 1833 the reformed Parliament gave him a stipendiary post, which he held until his death in 1836. Barbara Taylor

Olympe de Gouges (1748–93)

Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, Olympe de Gouges became one of the most prominent feminist author-activists of the French revolutionary era. After the death of her husband Pierre Aubry in the late 1760s, she moved to Paris with her son. In the 1780s and 90s she published more than sixty political texts, including plays, pamphlets, and posters plastered across the walls of Paris. Her most well known text, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), proclaimed that women shared natural rights with men, demanded a public political role for women, and exposed contradictions within the meaning and practice of universal rights. This manifesto also argued for replacing women’s marital subjection with a new ‘social contract between man and woman’ that would guar- antee shared control over property and protect woman’s right to name and raise her child. Olympe de Gouges’s plays outlined programs for social reform, such as the abolition of slavery, an end to forced religious vows, and the legalization of divorce. During the Revolution, she became a prominent ﬁgure in the legislative galleries and Parisian political clubs. Initially, she supported the creation of the constitutional monarchy and even offered to defend King Louis XVI when he was put on trial in 1792. She became increasingly allied with the Girondins and produced a series of controversial political pamphlets. Her support for a possible federalist alternative to the Jacobin republic landed her in prison in July 1793 and she was guillotined in November 1793. In reporting her death, the newspaper, the Courrier républicain announced, ‘Remember this virago, this woman-man, the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who ﬁrst instituted women’s societies, wanted to engage in politics, and committed crimes.’ Although she was executed for her Girondin political stance, her feminist activism aggravated contemporary resentments against her. Over the longer term, various post-revolutionary feminists drew inspiration from her probing writings and activism. Suzanne Desan

Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645)

Marie de Gournay grew up in a moderately prosperous noblesse de robe family. Her father died early (1577), but her mother took good care of the family, though she did not approve of Marie’s intellectual ambitions. Marie, however, read everything she could lay her hands on, and taught herself Latin by comparing original texts with French translations. She steadfastly refused an arranged marriage, and remained single to the end of her life. In 1584, Gournay read Montaigne’s Essais: she was instantly electrified, and henceforth ardently desired to carve out a place for herself in the world of letters. In 1588 she met Montaigne in Paris. He became ‘a second father’ to her, offering her friendship and an entrance to the world of writers and philosophers. Marie corresponded with Montaigne until his death in 1592. She became his literary executor: in 1595 she edited the first complete publication of the Essais with a long introduction by herself in which she defended Montaigne against accusations of heresy. After 1600 Gournay slowly made her own literary reputation, publishing poetry, prose and comments on the French language. She frequented the salon of Madame des Loges Enlightenment Biographies 731 where she met prominent figures from the literary world, such as Voiture, Balzac and Vaugelas. As a female author, however, she had to suffer much slander and abuse. It only strengthened her feminist convictions, culminating in her defense of the equality of the sexes in Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622). In the 1620s and 1630s Gournay was a prolific author, publishing large collections of her work in 1626, 1634,and 1641, as well as a new edition of Montaigne’s Essais (1635). She contributed to the founding of the Académie Française, and in 1635 she was the only female author included in the Parnasse Royal, published in honour of Louis XIII. She died in 1645, at the age of 79. Siep Stuurman

John Gregory (1724–73)

John Gregory, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and author of several popular works, belonged to the literary circles that characterized the Enlightenment in Scotland. The son of James Gregory, professor of medicine at King’s College, Aberdeen, and Anne Chalmers (whose father George Chalmers was Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen), he was born at Aberdeen into a family of distinguished physicians and mathematicians. He studied at King’s College, Aberdeen before pursuing medical studies first at the University of Edinburgh and then at Leyden (1745–76). From 1746 to 1749 he held a professorship at Aberdeen, where he lectured on mathematics and natural and moral philosophy. In 1752 he married Elizabeth Forbes (d. 1761), daughter of Lord Forbes, with whom he had three sons and three daughters (the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1771). In 1754 he moved to London to set up a successful medical practice, returning to Aberdeen in 1755 to take up the position of professor of medicine at King’s College. In 1764 he moved to Edinburgh, where he combined his teaching duties with a practice that would earn him the title of physician to the king in Scotland. A member of the Royal Society and one of the founders of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Gregory enjoyed the friendship of such figures as David Hume, Lord Monboddo, and James Beattie, and engaged in a close correspondence with the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, whose patronage of Gregory’s eldest daughter came to an abrupt end when Dorothea Gregory refused to marry Montagu’s nephew (she married Archibald Alison in 1781). To contemporaries, Gregory’s literary status rested on his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man (1765, with numerous reprints in Britain and America), a combi- nation of medicine, ethics, and natural history which sought to defend the common sense philosophy of his cousin Thomas Reid against the scepticism of his friend David Hume. He is now best remembered for his posthumously published A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), which ran through numerous editions and reprints in Britain and America and which was translated into French, German and Russian. He also published several works in medicine, and his Duties of a Physician (1770) is now seen as a significant contribution to the development of modern medical ethics. Mary Catherine Moran

Elizabeth Grifﬁth (1727–93)

Elizabeth Griffith was born in Wales and brought up in Dublin, where she acted in Thomas Sheridan’s theatre company from 1749. She secretly married the aristocratic but penniless Richard Griffith in 1751, after a long correspondence, which she later trans- formed into A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757) – an immediate literary sensation. As a model of sentimental romance blended with witty exchange and moral bite, the letters established the fame but not the fortune of their authors. Elizabeth Griffith’s first play, the tragedy Theodorick, King of Denmark, recently discovered by Betty Rizzo, was published in Dublin in 1752. It was never produced but probably raised £25 732 Enlightenment Biographies in subscriptions. After moving to London in 1753 to join the Covent Garden theatre company, Elizabeth began to write comedies: The Platonic Wife (1765), adapted from Marmontel, The Double Mistake (1766); A Wife in the Right (1772); The Times (1779), adapted from Goldoni,; and a revision of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1800). She dedicated The Morals of Shakespeare Illustrated (1775) to David Garrick, her long-term employer, and cites Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare (1769) as inspirational. ‘Shakespeare is not only my Poet, but my Philosopher also’, declared Griffith, extending Johnson’s concern with Shakespeare’s ‘purely ethic’ morals to highlight his ‘general economy of life … domestic ties, offices and obligations’, and showing particular interest in his heroines. She edited A Collection of Novels (1777) which included work by Aubin, Heywood and Behn – an unusual attempt to reassess novelists who were at that time synonymous with sexual immorality. Her last works were spirited epistolary novels, The History of Lady Barton (1771) and The Story of Juliana Harvey (1776). The return of a wealthy son from India removed the need to write. Elizabeth Eger

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816)

Elizabeth Hamilton was the daughter of Katherine Mackay of Dublin, and Charles Hamilton, a Scottish merchant in Belfast. The youngest of three children, she was sent in 1762 to live with her Scottish uncle and aunt near Stirling, and from the age of 13 was educated at home mainly by her aunt. She was greatly influenced by her brother Charles, an orientalist scholar, and in 1786 she joined him in London, where he introduced her into literary and political circles, until his death in 1792. His inspiration was evident in her Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), which used the perspective of a visiting Hindu Rajah from northern India to mock the follies of British society. She wrote in an anti-jacobin spirit against the ideas of the French Revolution, yet also with a progressive concern to improve women’s education. Her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) satirised radical ideas, but at the same time supported Mary Wollstonecraft’s educational views, and female philanthropy. Her major interest lay in education and in her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801–02) she suggested to her women readers that they should be acquainted with the philosophy of the human mind. In this she was influenced by Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University. With his encouragement she took up residence in Edinburgh from 1804 and with Eliza Fletcher played an active role in literary society there. Her later works included Memoirs of Agrippina (1804), a semi-fictional didactic biography, much less successful than The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), which humor- ously related the education, cleansing and civilizing of the McClarty family of Perthshire. After a period in 1804–05 as governess to the daughters of Lord Lucan, she published Letters Addressed to the Daughters of a Nobleman (1806) and the Series of Popular Essays (1813), both on the philosophy and practice of education. She did not marry but lived mainly in her later years with her widowed sister, Katherine Blake. Jane Rendall

Mary Hays (1759–1843)

Mary Hays (1759–1843) was the most purposefully intellectual woman among the ‘Gallic philosophesses’ in the 1790s. Her earliest text was the ‘book’ of their love letters she con- structed after the sudden death of her Dissenting lover, John Eccles, in 1780. She came under the influence of Robert Robinson (1735–1790), radical proponent of the ‘the right to private judgment’, who gave Hays access to advanced Huguenot notions of ‘universal toleration’ which Hays applied to women. Hays acted on the Dissenting mandate to inquire, even into areas such as love and sex. She sought training in the new science of mind by Enlightenment Biographies 733 participating on the periphery of the final flowering of Unitarian pedagogy at New College Hackney as ‘proto-coed’, reading and discussing faculty publications at her demi-salon in her mother’s home in Southwark. In 1791, Hays entered the controversy over ‘public or social worship’ as ‘Eusebia’ (the pious woman), when former New College classicist, Gilbert Wakefield, attacked the practices of his Dissenting colleagues. She was an intimate of Mary Wollstonecraft; when they met in 1792, Wollstonecraft was mentor to Hays as one of ‘a new genus’ of professional women writers, advising her on Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) in which Hays broke new ground by interpreting Enlightenment concepts for a female audience. After Wollstonecraft returned to London in autumn 1795, Hays proved her staunch defender, and famously reintroduced Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. She was publicly excoriated for explicit expressions of female sexual and intellectual passion in her ‘fiction’, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) that incorporated correspondence with Godwin, and with the Unitarian mathematician William Frend, the object of her desire. Hays’s ‘memoirs’ of Wollstonecraft after her death was the first of an imagined continuum of women represented in her Female Biography (1803), reinventing the genre by including reformers, courtesans, and the British historian Catharine Macaulay Graham. In Memoirs of Queens (1821), her last published work, Hays identified a unique historical moment when British women of all classes coalesced as a political force in public support for the uncrowned Queen Caroline of Brunswick during the spectacular ‘Queen’s Trial’. With women’s civic participation, Hays predicted, ‘all things will become new’. Hays’s equivocal reputation as controversialist in her own time continued well into the twentieth century. Gina Luria Walker

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809)

Thomas Holcroft, dramatist, novelist and translator, was the son of a shoemaker who worked as a stable-boy before launching a career in writing. A string of early successes in the 1780s made him a fixture in the London literary scene, where he soon distinguished himself for his radical political positions. (Holcroft has been described as the ‘first revolutionary novelist’.) A member of the Society for Constitutional Information, Holcroft was put on trial for high treason in 1794 – charged, among other things, with trying to establish a national convention in England and with circulating the works of Thomas Paine. Eventually acquitted, Holcroft continued to agitate for reform long after Jacobin sympathizing fell out of favour. Holcroft’s radicalism extended to his ideas regarding male–female relations. In his 1792 novel Anna St. Ives, Holcroft drew on the philosophical arguments of his close friend William Godwin to imagine a world in which men and women might reject civil marriage and join themselves together instead in what Mary Wollstonecraft, in her review of the work, described as ‘democratic sentiments’. ‘Of all the regulations which were ever suggested to the mistaken tyranny of selfishness’, Holcroft wrote, ‘none perhaps to this day have surpassed the despotism of those which undertake to bind not only body to body but soul to soul, to all futurity, in despite of every possible change which our vices and our virtues might effect, or however numerous the secret corporal or mental imperfections might prove which a more intimate acquaintance should bring to light!’ Though Holcroft’s arguments opened him to charges of libertinism, the testimonies of his many mixed-sex friends and acquaintances make clear that he was ultimately interested in promoting human happiness. As Wollstonecraft observed, summing up Anna St. Ives, ‘Some of the characters are rather over-charged, but the moral is assuredly a good one. It is calculated to strengthen despairing virtue, to give fresh energy to the cause of humanity, to repress the pride and insolence of birth, and to shew [sic] that true nobility which can alone proceed from the head and the heart, claims genius and virtue for its armorial bearings, and possessed of these, despises all the foppery of either ancient or modern heraldry.’ Arianne Chernock 734 Enlightenment Biographies

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782)

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was an influential Scottish judge and author, and one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in Scotland. The son of minor landed gentry at Eccles in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, Henry Home was educated at home before pursuing legal studies in Edinburgh, and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723. In 1741 he inherited the Kames estate and married Agatha Drummond, who would inherit her family’s estate at Blair Drummond in Stirlingshire in 1766. He became ‘Lord Kames’ when he was appointed to the Court of Sessions (Scotland’s highest civil court) in 1752, and was appointed to the High Court of the Justiciary (Scotland’s highest criminal court) in 1763. Kames is often viewed as the quintessential Scottish Enlightenment figure, a practical man of affairs who also achieved prominence as a man of letters. In addition to his legal career, Kames sat on the boards of two governmental agencies, belonged to a number of the important clubs and societies, and served as patron to the generation of literati who are associated with the high point of the Enlightenment in Scotland. Among those who benefited from his patronage were Adam Smith, whose public lectures at Edinburgh in 1748-51 were sponsored by Kames, and Smith’s student John Millar, who lived at the Kames household while quali- fying as an advocate and who owed his chair in civil law at the University of Glasgow to the influence of Kames and Smith. While he published on a wide variety of topics, from legal history to flax-husbandry to education, Kames is now best remembered for his Elements of Criticism (1762), which is considered a classic in the history of aesthetics, and his Sketches of the History of Man (1774), a progressive account of the history of the human species and a typical example of Scottish conjectural history. He also made a significant contribution to the development of Scottish Moral Sense philosophy with his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1759), a response to Humean scepticism which sought to vin- dicate the veracity of our common moral intuitions and of our common sense perceptions. Mary Catherine Moran

David Hume (1711–76)

David Hume, philosopher, historian and man of letters, was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy. Born into a family of Scottish gentry in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, he was the younger son of Joseph Home (1681–1713) and Katherine Falconer (1683–1745). From 1723 to 1725 or 1726, he attended Edinburgh University, but left without taking a degree. Though his family intended him to pursue the law, in his autobiographical essay ‘My Own Life’ (published posthumously in 1777 in accordance with the instructions Hume left to his close friend Adam Smith) he recorded that by age eighteen he had determined to become a philosopher and scholar. After five years of study at home, he spent three years in France (1734–37), where he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). For the next three decades, Hume published in a wide variety of areas, while variously holding positions as tutor to the Marquess of Annandale (1745), as Keeper of the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh (1752–57), as Secretary to Lord Hertford (1763–65, at Paris) and as Under- Secretary of State, Northern Department (1767–68). His two attempts to secure a university position (first at Edinburgh University in 1744–45, then at Glasgow Univeristy in 1752) both ended in failure, due to the vehement opposition of the Scottish clergy. He settled at Edinburgh in 1768, where he died in 1776. Lionized in the French salons as ‘le bon David’ and excoriated by evangelical Scottish ministers as a dangerous infidel, Hume made significant contributions to epistemology, ethics, social theory and historiography. After his Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’, Hume determined to present his philosophy in a more accessible form, rewriting Part I of his Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first pub- Enlightenment Biographies 735 lished as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding in 1748), and revising Part III of his Treatise to produce An Enquiry concering the Principles of Morals (1751). While Hume’s fame now rests on his achievements in philosophy, contemporaries knew him as the author of the six-volume History of England (1754–62), which secured his reputation as one of Britain’s greatest historians. His Essays Moral, Politcal and Literary were first published in 1741, and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion was published posthumously in 1779. Mary Catherine Moran

Alexander Jardine (1739?– 99)

Born in Applegirth, Dumfriesshire, a captain of the royal invalid artillery, Alexander Jardine may at ﬁrst seem an unlikely candidate for the feminist pantheon. But this close friend of the philosopher William Godwin developed strong pro-Woman views during his travels through Europe and North Africa during the 1770s and 1780s, where he encountered women in a range of unconventional social roles. In his Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, & c , published in 1788, Jardine offered up an extended meditation on the similar- ities between the sexes, paving the way for the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman four years later. ‘The talents or abilities of the sexes are probably nearly equal, when equally cultivated’, he observed. ‘[O]r, if some mental constitutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex, and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize.’ Jardine further elaborated this position in his edition of An Essay on Civil Government, or Society Restored, translated from the Italian of ‘A.D.R.S’ in 1793, in which he argued for co-education and marriage reform. In her ‘Advertisement to the Reader’ in An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, published in 1798, Mary Hays would cite the work of both Jardine and Wollstonecraft in explaining why she had waited so long to publish her own views on the subject. Hays’ pairing of these two ﬁgures in her preface suggests that Jardine’s argument in support of women’s rights circulated quite extensively during the 1790s. Arianne Chernock

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

Kant lived his whole life in the city of Königsberg, then part of East Prussia. His father was a saddle maker whose Pietism exerted a lasting inﬂuence on his son. Kant attended the University of Königsberg where he focused on philosophy, mathematics, and physics. He spent his entire career at this university, starting as a lecturer, and ultimately becoming its rector. At the same time, he achieved a Europe-wide reputation as a philosopher through his published writings. Around 1769 Kant experienced what he called a great ‘upheaval’ in his thinking, possibly from reading Hume’s works of Philosophical skepticism. His most important works of philosophy were the result of this ‘critical turn’: Critique of pure Reason(1781), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics(1783); Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason(1788) and Critique of Judgment(1790). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason established the basic of knowledge claims now associated with the Enlightenment and modernity by working out a position that avoided both skepticism and determinism, but assumed universal human reason. Between 1784 and 1786, Kant’s interventions in several public debates, including his response to the question, ‘What is Enlightenment’, made him a prominent representative of the German Englightenment. By the 1790s, however, a backlash against the Enlightenment developed in Germany, and Kant’s ability to publish freely was constrained by the order of this king. Thereafter Kant avoided the subject of religion but published on other topics until his death in 1804. Dena Goodman 736 Enlightenment Biographies

Marie-Madeleine Jodin (1741–90)

Marie-Madeleine Jodin was the daughter of Jean Jodin, a Genevan watchmaker and a friend of the philosopher Diderot, who consulted him on watch-making for the Encyclopédie. As the daughter of Swiss Protestants living in Paris, she converted to Catholicism, apparently unwillingly, at the age of nine. From the ages of nine to fifteen, she was sent to and ejected from five convents and when returned to her parents, was alleged to have a violent nature and to have led a disorderly life. Her father dead, in 1761 she was denounced by her relations and imprisoned by lettres de cachet in La Salpêtrière Prison for prostitutes. Released in 1763-64, she was licensed as an actress with the Comédie Française and subsequently played in court and provincial theatres in Warsaw, Dresden, Bordeaux and Angers. While engaged by the Saxon Court in Dresden, she became the mistress of Count Werner von der Schulenburg, Danish Envoy to Saxony. Their relationship was so public and considered so scandalous that she was imprisoned briefly by the Saxon authorities. Schulenburg aban- doned his diplomatic post in a gesture of outrage. Jodin retained her rebellious temperament throughout her acting career, as is evidenced by various lawsuits and libels. In spite of her disastrous educational experiences, she was widely read in literature, philosophy and history and was enthusiastic for the materialist theories of philosophers like Helvétius. From 1765 to 1769 she was in correspondence with Diderot whose 21 letters to her develop his theories about drama as well as offering financial and moral advice. In the last year of her life and in the early stages of the French Revolution she published the first signed, woman-authored, feminist pamphlet of the Revolutionary period, Vues législatives pour les femmes (Legislative Views for Women). Part of her surviving estate was left to Mme Diderot. Felicia Gordon

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821)

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) was a schoolmaster and Anglican cleric whose treatise Liberal Education (1781) was one of the most popular works on education in his time. Knox was born in Newington Green, Middlesex, and educated at home till he was fourteen. He was then sent to Merchant Taylors School where his father was master. At the age of nineteen, he was elected fellow of St John’s College Oxford, where he soon acquired such a high reputation for his Latin verse that he was elected one of the speakers for the Encoenia when Lord North was installed as Chancellor. In 1778, he resigned his fellowship to become headmaster of Tunbridge school, against the wishes of Dr Dennis, President of St John’s College and of Mrs Montague. They feared the responsibilities of the post would interfere with the development of his already outstanding literary talents. As he had decided to marry, his determination remained ﬁxed. In 1812, he resigned from the school and moved to a house in Adelphi Terrace, the Strand, in London. He continued as minister of the parochial chapelry of Shipbourn in Kent, having been ordained priest by Bishop Louth in 1777. Knox is an interesting ﬁgure, combining an enlightened perspective on a variety of issues with a staunch support of traditional values. An educational reformer, his plan to regener- ate boys’ public schools was based on reviving the most conservative classical curriculum. He was at the same time a strong advocate of female education. Liberal Education includes a chapter on the education of women, as do Essays Moral and Literary (1778) written when he was at Oxford. In 1793, he preached a sermon in Brighton on the ‘Unlawfulness of Offensive War’, which made him the object of a riot a few days later. His lifelong commitment to the discipline of the classics and to the social system it upheld is evident in the pamphlet he wrote, towards the end of his life, opposing a Parliamentary Bill to educate the poor in grammar schools, in a parallel stream to that of classical scholars. Knox argued this would inevitably degrade the schools and dilute their liberal education. The Bill was withdrawn. Enlightenment Biographies 737

Knox knew the most prominent literary ﬁgures of his day. He had developed a friendship with Oliver Goldsmith while still at school, and knew Johnson, Boswell and James Beattie as well as Charles Dilly, the bookseller who ﬁrst published the Essays. Winter Evenings, another collection of miscellaneous papers, came out in 1787, Personal Nobility, an educational and conduct manual, in 1793; Knox also edited expurgated versions of Horace and Juvenal for schools and wrote a variety of theological texts. His Essays were translated into most European languages, and he was awarded a Doctor’s degree by the University of Philadelphia as expression of the esteem in which his work was held in America. Michèle Cohen

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733)

The talented Anne-Thérèse is said to have profited intellectually from the influence of her literary step-father, François de Bachaumont and his Epicurean circle of friends, though she was later to become involved in a protracted legal battle with him over her father’s inheritance (the latter had died when she was three). Well-educated and well-read, with a command of the art of conversation that befitted a member of the enlightened aristocracy, Lambert was to become a celebrated salonnière and writer, though she opened her salon only when she was over sixty and was reluctant to have her works published during her lifetime. Married at eighteen to Henri de Lambert (lieutenant-général and governor of Luxemburg), she had four children, two of whom survived into adulthood. It was for each of these surviving children that she wrote her famous letters of advice to her son and her daughter. She was widowed in 1686. When some of her works were published in 1726 and 1727, she was said to have felt ‘dishonoured’ by exposure to the public eye. Yet, although she felt that it was compromising for a woman of her rank to publish, she seems to have desired publication after her death. Her writings were well viewed, especially for the way in which she allegedly made the practice of virtue seem desirable. Her salon in the Hôtel de Nevers (rue de Richelieu) became the most famous in Paris and was seen as the heir to the famous ‘chambre bleue’ of the marquise de Rambouillet, which had dominated Paris society in its long life from 1610 to 1665. Set up to counter the prevailing fashion for dissipation and gambling, Lambert’s salon was seen as bestowing respectability on its regular visitors. When she died, one of these, the writer and scientist, Fontenelle (who was both a member of the Académie française and permanent secretary to the Académie des Sciences) wrote an éloge for her, celebrating her character, learning and literary discernment. Jean Bloch

James Henry Lawrence (1773–1840)

Born in Jamaica, educated at Eton and in Germany, James Henry Lawrence was an enthusiastic advocate of ‘Nairism’ – the radical idea, loosely modeled on the cultural practices of the Nairs of southwest India, that all societies should ban marriage, encourage casual sexual relationships, and replace the patriarchal family with a matrilineal system of inheritance. In several essays, novels, songs and poems, including his most famous ‘utopian romance’, The Empire of the Nairs, or The Rights of Women (published in German in 1800 and translated into English by the author in 1811), Lawrence waxed philosophic on the benefits of Nairism, celebrating its promotion of love, truth, and equality between men and women. Although Lawrence identified himself as a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, however, his arguments weren’t always clearly egalitarian. In attacking prevailing attitudes towards marriage, education, property, and morality, Lawrence was perhaps more interested in liberating men than in liberating women. What Lawrence hoped to achieve, in implementing the Nair system, was a nation in which men – lacking both wife and children – could commit 738 Enlightenment Biographies themselves to ‘masculine’ pursuits. ‘What a race of politicians, generals, and philosophers, might be expected in a nation where every lofty goal were unimpeded, by the care of providing for its offspring, from following any grand object in contemplation!’, Lawrence ecstatically noted in his ‘An Essay on the Nair System of Gallantry and Inheritance’. ‘This consideration has detained the field; has deadened the curiosity of the philosophers, and stopped the voice of the patriot’. Arianne Chernock

Catherine Macaulay (1731–91)

Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham was born in Kent into a wealthy whig family, and was privately educated. She lived subsequently in London, where the Sawbridges were active in City of London politics, moving to Bath in 1774. She was twice married: first, in 1760 to Dr George Macaulay (d. 1766), the father of her only daughter, also called Catharine. In 1778 she married William Graham, a man 26 years younger than herself – an age difference which attracted adverse comment at the time. After her second marriage she lived in Leicestershire. Known in her own day as ‘Mrs Macaulay’, she achieved contemporary fame as an historian. The first volume of her History of England was published in 1763. The final, eighth volume, appeared in 1781. She subsequently embarked on a separate history from the 1688 revolution to her own day, but only completed one volume. Her History, whose chronological scope 1603–1721 reflects her republican views and offers a whig interpretation of the events surrounding and ensuing the English Civil war. In politics she was a supporter of Wilkes and took an active part as a pamphleteer. She wrote against Edmund Burke and defended Richard Price’s defence of the French Revolution. Following the international fame brought by History, she visited France in 1777, and Boston and New York in 1784. Catharine Macaulay’s reputation as a feminist rests on her Letters on Education (1790) in which she champions the education of women as the equals of men. She also wrote a work on ethics entitled A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), some of which was incorporated in her Letters on Education. Sarah Hutton

John Millar (1735–1801)

John Millar was professor of civil law at the University of Glasgow, student and friend of Adam Smith, author of two important works of historiography, and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Born at Blantyre, near Glasgow, the eldest son of James Millar, a Church of Scotland minister, and Anne Hamilton, he entered the Old College at Glasgow at age eleven. Though initially intended for the church, he chose to pursue the law. In 1751 he attended Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and moral philosophy, which had an enormous influence on his subsequent intellectual development. While studying to qualify as an advocate, Millar spent two years in the Kames household, where he served as tutor to Lord Kames’s son. In 1759 he married Margaret Craig, with whom he had eight daughters and five sons (with one girl and one boy dying in infancy). He was admitted to the bar in 1760. Thanks to the patronage of Kames and Smith, he was appointed Chair of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow in 1761, a position he held until shortly before his death. Millar is best known for his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779; first published in 1771 as Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society), a central contribution to Scottish ‘conjectural’ or philosophical history and a key text in the development of sociol- ogy. With its lengthy opening chapter on ‘the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages’, the Origin is also a notable example of Enlightenment interest in the history of women. In his other major historical work, the Historical View of the English Government Enlightenment Biographies 739

(1787), Millar opposed what he saw as the monarchical and authoritarian sympathies of Hume’s History of England. A staunch Whig with republican sympathies, Millar was a supporter of the American Revolution, a vocal opponent of the slave trade, and an early supporter (at least in its initial phases) of the French Revolution. Two anonymously published pamphlets opposing the war against France have been attributed to Millar: he was almost certainly the author of Letters on Crito (1796) and has also been suggested as author of Letters on Sydney (1796), which may have been the work of his nephew and biographer, John Craig. Mary Catherine Moran

Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800)

Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson) was born in Yorkshire, elder daughter of Elizabeth Drake and Matthew Robinson, landowner. Her younger sister was the novelist Sarah Scott, author of the 1762 novel Millenium Hall [sic], a utopian tale of a female community based upon the ideals of learning, economy, charity and friendship. She was brought up in Cambridge, where she frequented the literary meetings of her grandfather, the classicist Conyers Middleton, author of the celebrated Life of Cicero (1741) and a fellow of Trinity College. Her youthful letters to her friend the Duchess of Portland, which she signed ‘Fidget’, convey a lively and often mischievous intellect. In 1742 she married the wealthy Edward Montagu, nearly thirty years her senior. Their only child, ‘Punch’, died when still a baby. Montagu was perhaps most famous in her lifetime as the leader of bluestocking society, ﬁrst in her Hill Street home and later in Montagu House, the palatial mansion she built in Portman Square after her husband’s death in 1775. Her guests included Samuel Johnson, who dubbed her ‘Queen of the Blues’, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick, Fanny Burney and Hannah More. Originally referring to mixed society, the term ‘bluestocking’ came to refer to women only from the 1760s, due to Montagu’s particular support of female learning and writing. She published three dialogues anonymously at the end of George Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and later An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, with some remarks on the Misrepresentations of Msr Voltaire (1769). This work proved extremely popular, celebrating Shakespeare as national poet of the vernacular and daring to refute Voltaire’s criticisms directly. Only by the time of the fourth edition, published in 1777, did Montagu’s name appear on the title page. Her letters were gathered together after her death in 1800 by her nephew, Matthew Robinson, who published them in 1810. Elizabeth Eger

Montesquieu (1689–1755)

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a gentleman writer, jurist, historian and philosopher, who might be considered the father of political science. He was born into a family which had long held high legal posts in the Bordeaux parlement or law-courts. He studied law with the Oratorians, spending the years 1709–13 in Paris, and married in 1715. Elected to the Bordeaux Academy in the same year, his first contributions were on natural science and on ancient Rome. Under the relatively permissive regime of the Regency (1715–23) he composed and published (anonymously and abroad) the Persian Letters, which were a huge and scandalous success. Attributed to imaginary Persian visitors to Paris, this pot-pourri of observations and reflections on social practices and values (Oriental and Western) blended satire with philosophical ideas, playfulness with critique, and libertinism with a certain ‘feminism’. It set the agenda for much French Enlightenment writing of the next forty years. Montesquieu contrived to live down this work, and the mildly erotic Temple of Cnidus (1725), sufficiently to be elected to the Académie Française in 1728. He 740 Enlightenment Biographies then embarked on three years of European travels (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Holland and chiefly England). In 1734 his Considerations on the Causes of Roman Greatness and Decline appeared. His major achievement, published abroad in 1748, was The Spirit of the Laws. Here he tried to establish a science of elements (from climate to economics), and of general principles, underlying different forms of government. These forms broadly into republican (inspired by virtue), monarchic (by honour) and despotic (by fear). He argued for humane values and some separation of powers. The work and its author were denounced in France and Montesquieu produced a Defense (1750). In 1754 he published an expanded version of the Persian Letters (1754), emphasising its qualities as an epistolary novel. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. Robin Howells

Lady Morgan (1776 –1859)

Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) was born on 25 December, 1776; the daughter of Irish-speaking actor Robert, originally MacOwen, (d.1812) and Englishwoman Jane Hill (d. 1789). She resided in Dublin, attending Madame Terson’s Academy, Clontarf. Though raised a Protestant, family visits to Connaught familiarized her with native Irish culture. The 1798 rebellion and 1800 Act of Union spelled decline for the theatre and Owenson became a governess and professional writer to help family finances. Her first publication Poems (1801), was followed by novels St Clair; or, the Heiress of Desmond (1802) and The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805). Owenson corresponded with the anti- quarians Joseph Walker, and Charlotte Brooke, whose Reliques of Irish Poetry appeared in 1789. She pioneered a nostalgic Romantic nationalism, publishing in 1805 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies: translated traditonal airs which inspired Thomas Moore. Her bestselling novel The Wild Irish Girl, a National Tale (1806) was followed in 1807 by more verse, The Lay of an Irish Harp and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland. Her comic opera The First Attempt, or Whim of a Moment (1807) starring her father, was performed in the Theatre Royal, Dublin. Advocacy of Catholic emancipation earned her the emnity of Dublin Castle, specifically of John Wilson Coker, who regularly savaged her in the Quarterly Review. Novels Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809) and The Missionary (1811) extended her critique of colonialism to the East and incorporated gender issues. In 1812 she married the freethinking surgeon Sir Charles Morgan (d.1843) and held a regular salon. O’Donnel, a National Tale (1814) was the first novel with a governess heroine. Florence Macarthy (1818) also had autobiographical elements; The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties (1827), explored the state of Ireland. Travelogues France (1817) and Italy (1821) were politically radical, the latter admired by Byron. Other publications included The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), the autobiographical Book of the Boudoir (1829), last novel The Princess, or The Beguine (1835); and a feminist history, Woman and her Master (1840). In 1837 the first woman to receive a literary pension from the British government, she died on 16 April, 1859. Caroline Franklin

Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820)

Born into an elite mercantile family, Judith Sargent became an essayist, playwright, and perhaps the most politically outspoken of late eighteenth-century American women writers. She spent her entire sixty-nine years in New England, first in Gloucester and later in Boston. Her intellectual talents recognised by her family, she was educated by a tutor alongside her Harvard-destined brother. Her first marriage, in 1769, to sea captain and trader John Stevens ended with his death in the West Indies. Her second marriage in 1788 was to Universalist preacher John Murray, and Universalist religious preoccupations run through much of her writing. ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ (1790) used that supposition Enlightenment Biographies 741 to argue for better education for girls and the encouragement of female self-worth, and revised the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Murray sought to be independent as a writer – an unusual ambition for any American in this period – and was a frequent contributor, like Mercy Otis Warren, to the Massachusetts Magazine. The Gleaner is her best-known publication: it included a novel, “The Story of Margaretta”, and a history of female genius from the ancient past to her present day. Together with her earlier essay, this has prompted historians to identify Murray as one of the principal architects of ‘republican motherhood’. ‘Sketch of the Present Situation of America’ (1794) is her most high political writing and exposes a Federalist stance in the turbulent party debates that followed the French Revolution. Murray’s final years were spent editing her husband’s papers and adding several chapters to the end of his autobiography. Sarah Knott

Suzanne Curchod Necker (1739–94)

Her father was a Calvinist pastor who died when she was young. She moved with her mother to the nearby city of Lausanne. There she was active in a women’s literary academy, the Académie de la Poivrière. When her mother died, she took a position as governess with a family that was moving to Paris. She arrived there in 1764, and through her employer she met Jacques Necker, a banker from Geneva who went on to distinguish himself in the administration of the French monarchy and to contribute to the Republic of Letters. They married in 1765. The next year she gave birth to a daughter, Anne-Louise Germaine, and began a salon. The daughter grew up to be the writer Germaine de Staël; the salon met weekly on Friday afternoons and continued until the departure of the Neckers from France for Switzerland in 1790. Suzanne Necker published virtually nothing during her lifetime. After her death her husband published a pamphlet she had been completing against divorce (1794), and ﬁve volumes of Mélanges (1798) and Nouveaux mélanges (1801) culled from the notebooks in which she had been writing down thoughts, essays, portraits, and éloges for nearly thirty years. Dena Goodman

Thomas Starling Norgate (1772–1859)

The pro-Woman essayist Thomas Starling Norgate came from a family of Norwich radicals – his father, the surgeon Elias Norgate, was a Unitarian Dissenter and Whig who was very active in local politics during the 1770s and 1780s. As one of the leading writers for the Cabinet, a pro-democratic publication printed in Norwich by John March from 1794–5, the younger Norgate provided one of the most sustained late-eighteenth- century arguments in support of women’s rights. In a two-part essay, aptly titled ‘On the Rights of Woman’, he emphatically insisted that ‘the mind knows no difference of sex,’ and proceeded to explain why it was necessary to provide women with a better education and employment opportunities, as well as political and legal rights. ‘It has been urged by the tyrannical opposers of female rights,’ Norgate wrote, ‘that women have occupations of a domestic kind, in which they are much better employed than in exercising any political ofﬁce, or in wielding a massy argument in favour of any political hypothesis; it is true that they have domestic occupation; but … what man is there dis- engaged from domestic concerns? we all, whether male or female, have a part, and none, whether male or female, have the whole of our time so necessarily employed as not to admit leisure for investigating a subject of such paramount importance to every- one, as that of politics.’ In older age, Norgate would revise his feminist beliefs – chalking them up to the radicalism of his youth – although he continued to insist that some of the more ‘sober hints’ were still ‘worthy of attention.’ Arianne Chernock 742 Enlightenment Biographies

Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

Tom Paine was a political theorist and activist who challenged the traditional institutions of his day on the basis of reason. He was born in Thetford, Norfok and came from a Quaker background. He emigrated to America in 1774 and published Common Sense (1776), an influential pamphlet which argued for American independence. In 1787 he returned to England. He had corresponded and met with Edmund Burke, but when Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Paine wrote the Rights of Man in response (published 1791 and 1792). This was not the first reply to Burke; Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft had also penned replies, but Paine’s was the most influential. Paine attacked Burke’s argument that political institutions should be founded on tradition, insist- ing instead that they should derive from human reason. All individuals, Paine argued, possess natural political rights – an idea with obvious feminist implications. Although Paine himself did not apply his ideas to women, his philosophy represented a significant move away from the classical republican tradition, which had based political citizenship on the masculine qualifications of military service, property ownership, and being head of household. The second part of his Rights of Man presented the germ of the idea of the welfare state, for Paine saw the government as obliged to provide for wider rights of citizenship beyond the franchise, such as help for families with children. Paine was prosecuted for treason for his criticisms of the British constitution and fled to Paris, where he became active in French revolutionary politics, although the Jacobins eventually imprisoned him. Paine also criticized conventional religion in his Age of Reason, published in 1794–95. Anna Clark

François Poulain de la Barre (1647–1723)

Born to a prosperous bourgeois family, Poulain studied theology at the Sorbonne. After his bachelors degree (1666), he turned to Cartesianism, and in the 1670s he published three feminist treatises: The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673), The Education of the Ladies (1674), and The Excellence of the Men: Against the Equality of the Sexes (1675). The last title is ironical: the preface discusses the Scriptural objections to equality, in the middle part a sexist straw man is set up, and the final part is devoted to the gleeful demolition of the sexist reasoning of the middle part. Taken together, the three books contain the outline of an Enlightenment social philosophy. Poulain did not obtain patronage. To make a living, he opted for the priesthood. In 1680 he became a curé de village in northern France. Poulain, a tolerant man, became a Catholic priest shortly before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when a veritable state terror was unleashed on the French Calvinists. In the end, he got in trouble, probably over the doctrine of transubstantiation, possibly because he helped the Protestants. In 1688, he left his charge, went to Paris, secretly converted to Calvinism, and shortly thereafter left France for Geneva (1689). There, he married Marie Ravier, a daughter of a prominent patrician family. They had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son, Jean Jacques. In 1696 Poulain was suspected of Unitarian ideas. He was not found guilty, but the affair thoroughly frightened him. In 1708, he finally got a tenured post as teacher at the Genevan college. In 1720 he published a treatise on biblical criticism that can be seen as his ‘theological autobiography’ and also as his last word on the religious issues that he had first grappled with in his feminist treatises in the 1670s. Poulain died in 1723, at the age of seventy-five. Siep Stuurman

Richard Price (1723–91)

The son of a Calvinist Dissenting minister, Richard Price became one of the most influential nonconformist writers of the late eighteenth century, producing important works of Enlightenment Biographies 743 theology, moral philosophy, economics, and political science. Educated at a series of nonconformist academies, Price turned away from his father’s Calvinism to a liberal belief typical of the ‘rational’ Dissenters who came to think of themselves as ‘Unitarians’. In 1757, the same year in which he married Sarah Blundell (d. 1786), Price rose to national attention with A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (revised in 1787 and now seen as a forerunner of Kantian ethics). Having settled in Newington Green, where he ministered to a Dissenting congregation, during the 1760s and 1770s Price wrote tracts on the British population and economy, influencing the development of actuarial science and advocating the elimination of the national debt. Opposed to the War with the American colonies, in 1776 Price published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which earned him a considerable degree of fervent admiration as well as vilification and which inspired the American Declaration of Independence. In 1778 Price entered a public debate with his friend Joseph Priestley concerning materialism and necessity, with Price maintaining the immateriality of the soul and the free agency of the human will. After 1784 Price became a close friend and mentor of Mary Wollstonecraft, who, although raised an Anglican, attended Price’s sermons. Two years before his death, Price enthusiastically wel- comed the French Revolution in the belief that France was embracing and refining the principles of the English Revolution of a hundred years earlier. Price’s sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) provoked Edmund Burke to respond in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), thus instigating the French Revolution debate in England. Daniel White

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)

A Dissenting polymath, Joseph Priestley shaped late-eighteenth-century religion, philosophy, politics, and science. Born in Yorkshire and raised a Calvinist, he was educated at the Daventry Academy, where he began to reject orthodoxy. Priestley would ultimately become the leading spokesman for Unitarianism, his beliefs centering upon the Arminian rejection of original sin, the Socinian denial of Christ’s divinity and atonement, the materialist position that the soul is not distinct from the body, and the necessarian doctrine (consequent upon materialism and Hartleian associationism) that all human actions are fixed by a natural succession of causes and effects. After Daventry he held a series of ministerial positions, eventually joining the faculty of the Warrington Academy. At Warrington (1761–67) he married Mary Wilkinson (d. 1796), befriended Anna Letitia Barbauld, pursued theological and scientific researches, and wrote An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768). Having assumed a ministry in Leeds, in 1773 he became librarian to the Earl of Shelburne. Priestley’s Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74) defended rational Dissenting theology, and in 1774 he made the scientific advance for which he is usually remembered, the isolation of ‘dephlogisticated air’, often described as the discovery of oxygen. Quitting Shelburne’s employ in 1780, he moved to Birmingham, where he served as minister, associated with the Lunar Society, defended Unitarianism in debates with Samuel Horsley, and agitated for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (earning the nickname ‘Gunpowder Priestley’). On 14 July 1791, the Constitutional Society of Birmingham commemorated the fall of the Bastille. A mob responded by rioting, and Priestley’s house was destroyed. He left Birmingham soon afterwards for Hackney. Having become a citizen of France and declined election to the National Convention, he emigrated to America in 1794, where he passed the remaining years of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Daniel White

Madeleine Darsant de Puisieux (1720–98)

Born in Paris in 1720, Madeleine Darsant is said to have shown signs of literary talent from an early age. Following her marriage to Philippe-Florent de Puisieux, she became a successful 744 Enlightenment Biographies writer, publishing prolifically between 1749 and 1768. He was an avocat at the Parlement de Paris, who worked as a translator more than he practised at the bar. Amongst his many translations from the English is, supposedly, a feminist tract: La Femme n’est pas inférieure à l’homme, first published in French in 1750 and republished in 1751 as Le Triomphe des dames. For some time the actual authorship of this work was attributed to him but, more recently, it has been suggested that either he co-authored it with Madeleine or that Madeleine herself was the author. What is not disputed is her authorship of a number of novels, the occasional comedy and a history of the reign of Charles VII, as well as the moral and satirical writings for which she was best known: Conseils à une amie (1749), Les Caractères (1750) and Réflexions et Avis sur les ridicules à la mode (1761). The Conseils, which offer advice to a young woman about to leave her convent school for the world outside, were particularly successful but much of her work received hostile criticism. In 1795, however, the Convention required her to pay a tax of 2,000 livres on income received from her publications, which suggests that they had sold well. From 1745 to 1748 she had an affair with Diderot. The cynical views of upper-class society and of the difficulties facing women in the mid-18th-century expressed in the Conseils may well owe something to her discussions with the philosophe. They certainly mark her out from other women writing on female education and conduct in that period. Jean Bloch

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1711–96)

The son of minor nobility from the Aveyron, Raynal was educated by the Jesuits in Rodez and became a priest. He left the Company of Jesus in 1747 and went to Paris where he frequented the salons, notably that of Mme Geoffrin, and made influential friends in philosophical and political circles, including Diderot, Voltaire and Choiseul, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Louis XV. Through his contacts he became editor of the Mercure de France and worked on Grimm’s Correspondance Littéraire. In 1762 Choiseul commissioned him to write his first big work, L’Ecole Militaire, a manual on modern military practice. He devoted the next two decades of his life to compiling the Histoire philosophique et politique des établisse- ments et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes for which he employed a team of anonymous collaborators including the Baron d’Holbach, the distinguished botanist, de Jussieu and Diderot. He also exploited a vast network of correspondants and informers – diplomats, slave-traders, soldiers, businessmen and travellers – from whom he acquired extensive up-to-date information. One of the bestsellers of the book trade prior to the Revolution, the first edition appeared in 1770, followed by some 50 editions over the next 20 years, many reprints of particular sections of the work, and an impressive number of translations. Described by Jules Michelet as the ‘Bible of the Revolution’, the work denounced slavery, colonialism and the abuses of the crown and the Church. It was widely read throughout Europe by statesmen, political thinkers, creative writers and ordinary people and was very influential in purveying ideals of liberty to the general public. It gen- erated an enormous pamphlet literature, including, amongst other writers, Thomas Paine; it was central, at a slightly later date, in the political debate surrounding the bid for independence of the colonies in Latin America. The work was banned in 1772, put on the Index in 1774 and burnt in public in 1781. To avoid incarceration Raynal left France and travelled around Europe appearing at the major courts as a martyr of free speech. He returned to France in 1784 and settled in Marseille from where he followed the events of the Revolution. To begin with he was venerated by the revolutionaries as a benefactor of humanity and an ‘ardent apostle of liberty’, and was offered a post as Deputy in the Estates General, which he turned down on account of his age. The events of the Terror, however, horrified him and in 1791 he denounced the excesses of the Revolution in a letter to the Assembly. His prestige and his great age enabled him to escape the guillotine but his reputation was ruined. Accused of senility, he spent the final years of his life in oblivion. Jenny Mander Enlightenment Biographies 745

Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800)

Mary Robinson was the daughter of an impoverished Bristol sea captain. She had a highly successful though brief acting career. Married to the ne’er-do-well Thomas Robinson by whom she had two daughters, she made her debut at Drury Lane with the encouragement of Garrick and Sheridan in 1776. In 1779 she began an affair with the Prince of Wales. The notoriety which ensued obliged her to leave the stage in the summer of 1780 and to separate from the Prince, in return for a lump payment and the promise of an annuity. Robinson, one of the most beautiful women of her day, was painted by Gainsborough, Hopner and Reynolds. She subsequently had affairs with other notables of the period: among them Sheridan, the Earl of Cholmondeley, Charles James Fox and Colonel Banastre Tarleton. After giving up the stage, she became a successful author, publishing poetry under the inﬂuence of Robert Merry of the Della Cruscian School. In politics she took up ideas of the radical Enlightenment, welcoming the French Revolution in her poem ‘Ainsi va le monde’ (‘So goes the world’). In spite of her radical sympathies, she mourned the fate of Marie Antoinette in a pamphlet, ‘Impartial Reﬂections on the situation of the Queen of France’ (1791) and a poem ‘Monody to the Memory of the Queen of France’ (1793). Aside from her voluminous poetry, she published a number of novels celebrating sentiment and the natural affections. Partly paralysed through much of her adult life by a rheumatic complaint, she continued to support herself and her daughter through her writing. In 1799 she published a feminist treatise, ‘A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental subordination’. She died on 26 December 1800 at the age of 42. Felicia Gordon

Robert Robinson (1735–90)

Robert Robinson was a theologically independent Baptist whose advanced views on freedom of conscience kept him mired in controversy. He left school at fourteen, although he demonstrated prodigious intellectual ability; his mother’s poverty caused him to apprentice with a London peruke maker, then a bridle maker. He became a country preacher after completing his apprenticeship, first to a group of Methodists, then as an Independent, and, from 1760 to 1790, as minister at St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church in Cambridge. He maintained a thriving farm in nearby Chesterton with his wife and twelve children, and established a beachhead of radical thought, independent of Cambridge University, although he used its libraries through faculty who were his parishioners. Robinson was a self-taught, iconoclastic apostle of the Christian Enlightenment, who was also grassroots activist, proto-socialist, reformist historian, early abolitionist, and mentor to younger Cambridge radicals, including William Frend and George Dyer. He founded the Cambridge Constitutional Society in 1780 to promote parliamentary reform, a free press, and unlimited toleration, and exerted striking influence in local electoral politics. He achieved notoriety for his efforts on behalf of repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; in an address to Parliament in March 1790 Burke singled out Robinson’s A Political Catechism (1782) for severe censure, condemning it as ‘one continued invective against Kings and Bishops’. Robinson produced fifty published works that contributed to the emergence of non-sectarian ‘Dissent’ as a new and fluid identity. Between 1770-77 he translated and provided commentary on the sermons of Jacques Saurin (1677-1730) and Jean Claude (1619–87), Huguenot theologians, victims of Le Refuge and participants in the dissident Republic of Letters after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Robinson’s translations attested to the alienation of English Dissenters from British establishment culture, by linking this with Huguenot resistance to Catholic censorship and persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robinson educated his daughters and sons equally; at his funeral, Joseph Priestley commended him for acting on the understanding that ‘the minds of women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture as that of men’. 746 Enlightenment Biographies

Robinson was Mary Hays’s ﬁrst and most important mentor, whom, in the last year of her life, she acknowledged as the ‘awakener of my mind.’ Gina Luria Walker

Mme Roland de la Platière (1754–93)

Born into the artistic bourgeoisie of Paris, Manon Phlipon was the daughter of an engraver and painter. She wrote appealingly about her childhood and upbringing in the autobiographical section of her memoirs. Reportedly a brilliant pupil, she received an above- average education for a girl of her class, thanks to instruction (including Latin) from a clerical uncle and encouragement in music, drawing and engraving from her father. In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she competed for the annual essay competition of the Besançon academy on the subject of how the better education of women might improve the conduct of men. No prize was awarded that year. In 1775 she had been introduced to Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière (1734–93) who was to become Minister of the Interior in 1792. Her father opposed her marriage to Roland, with whom she set about studying Greek and Roman literature, the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau and works of political economy, before she was ﬁnally free to marry him in 1780. The couple moved back to Paris from the provinces early in the Revolution and Mme Roland opened a salon which became the meeting place for a group of Revolutionary deputies, later known as the Girondins or Brissotins. She took an active part in the political struggles of the Revolution and was an open opponent of Danton and Robespierre. With the fall of the Girondins in June 1793, her husband escaped but she was arrested. When he learnt of her execution (15 November 1793) he committed suicide. In addition to her political activities, she is remembered for her memoirs, which were written in prison and cover both the private and political sides of her life. She presented her account of recent political events as an attempt to rescue her husband’s reputation, apparently seeking to underplay her own role, but it is claimed that it was she who was the real inspiration of the Girondins, that she ran her husband’s political affairs once he became Interior Minister, and that she was responsible for drawing up political documents to which he merely signed his name. Jean Bloch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born into a respectable but modest family in the Calvinist republic of Geneva. His mother died just after his birth, and he was raised till the age of ten by his father, a watchmaker of unstable character. After two years boarding with a pastor who tutored him, he was apprenticed to an engraver. Unhappy with his situation, at the age of 16 he ran away. His Wanderjahre saw him converted to Catholicism in Turin, moth- ered by Mme de Warens in Annecy then Chambery (‘Les Charmettes’) where he also educated himself, then turned itinerant music teacher and tutor in Lyon. In 1742 he went to Paris, and after a year with Louis XV’s ambassador in Venice he established himself in the capital of the French monarchy, where he mixed with bright young provincials like Diderot and Condillac. Secretary to a tax-farmer, he set up household with the servant Thérèse Levasseur, whose successive offspring were consigned at birth to the orphanage (a not uncommon practice) and who became his lifelong companion. On the way to visit his close friend Diderot in jail at Vincennes in 1749, he had – he later affirms – a vision of how mankind could recover virtue and happiness. He wrote the Discourse on Sciences and Arts. His eloquent denunciation of high civilisation and progressive Enlightenment values, as the source of individual and social corruption, brought him suddenly into prominence. He followed it with his first major philosophical work, the Discourse on Inequality (1755). Despite writing for the Encyclopedia, and success at court as a composer (The Village Soothsayer), in 1756 Rousseau withdrew from Paris. His Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (1758) Enlightenment Biographies 747 cemented his quarrel with the ‘philosophes’, who treated him henceforth as a traitor. In the late 1750s, living on the estates of noble patrons, he composed three great works. His epistolary novel of love and regeneration Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) was an enormous success. His treatise The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) was banned in France. But it is the theism of ‘The Savoyard Vicar’ in Emile, or On Education (1762) that prompted the authorities in both Paris and Geneva to order his arrest. He became a kind of refugee (including fifteen months in 1766–67 in England as the guest of Hume, with whom he quarreled, and receiving a pension from George III). Increasingly celebrated as the martyr of virtue, he became increasingly paranoid. He published justifications of his philosophy, drafts political projects for Corsican and Polish patriots, completed his Dictionary of Music (1768), and wrote defences of himself. His much-anticipated Confessions, the Dialogues and his intimate final work The Reveries of the Solitary Walker were published posthumously in the 1780s. Robin Howells

Pierre Roussel (1742–1802)

Born in Ax in 1742, Roussel is best known as the author of the Système physique et moral de la femme (1775), the most widely read medical treatise on women in eighteenth-century France. After receiving his training at the University of Medicine of Montpellier, Roussel moved to Paris and became a disciple of Théophile de Bordeu, a celebrated high-society practitioner and theorist of medical vitalism. Like Bordeu, Roussel tailored his medical practice to the ills and the temperament deemed peculiar to the ‘sensitive’ women of the social elite. After his own delicate health forced him to abandon his practice, Roussel devoted himself to writing book reviews for various scientiﬁc and literary journals (Le Journal des beaux-arts, La Clef du cabinet des souverains, Le Mercure de France, Le Journal des savants, La Décade philosophique, politique et littéraire). Roussel never married, but he did frequent Parisian salons like that held by Mme Helvétius, where he met Cabanis and other thinkers intent on making medicine an integral part of ‘anthropology’, or the sciences of man. Although keenly interested in politics, Roussel was too timid to engage actively in the events of the French Revolution; he was nonetheless subsidized under the Convention and named associate member of the French National Institute upon its creation in 1795. Roussel’s Système, a medico-philosophical inquiry into women’s nature that adopted a vitalist approach to the human persona, did much to popularize both anthropological per- spectives on women and the radical view of sex difference which would mark French medical discourse for decades afterward. In addition to the Syste`me, Roussel wrote important essays on sensibility and sympathy. His three volume work Médecine domestique (1805) was published after his death as part of the Bibliothèque Universelle des dames. Anne Vila

Benjamin Rush (1746–1813)

The controversial leading physician of the early American republic, Benjamin Rush was a proliﬁc literary and medical writer and commentator, not least on matters of sex and gender. He was born to a farming family but married exceptionally well into the New Jersey political and intellectual elite. Judith Stockton was daughter of poet Annis Boudinot and politician Richard Stockton, and the physician’s wife (and mother to nine living children) from 1776 to his death. Rush’s medical training was in Edinburgh and the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as a fervent religiosity, can be seen through all his activities. His medical career spanned practice as a physician from 1769 to 1813, service in the Continental Army and numerous philanthropic institutions, and teaching at the College of Philadelphia. Though a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the man who arranged the publication and suggested the title for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, his 748 Enlightenment Biographies radical political career was short and disillusioning. In the young nation, the doctor continued his pre-revolutionary reformist efforts for temperance and the abolition of slavery. To these social concerns, he added women’s education (for their republican role in the home), prison reform and the abolition of public and capital punishments. Increasingly conservative in his maturity, Rush developed an American medical theory of mind and body that placed inordinate emphasis on sensibility and sympathy but–unlike his Scottish mentors, and in explicit reaction to Mary Wollstonecraft–highly elaborated woman’s inferiority and biological distinctiveness. Sarah Knott

Adam Smith (1723–90)

Born at Kirkcaldy, son of the comptroller of customs there, Adam Smith was educated at Kirkcaldy grammar school and at Glasgow University, from 1737-40, after which he went to Balliol College Oxford, for seven years. In 1748, in Edinburgh, he gave lectures on jurisprudence and rhetoric, under the patronage of Lord Kames. In 1751 he won the Chair of Logic at Glasgow, and in 1755 moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. He spent much time in Edinburgh, where, with David Hume, he founded the Select Society, helped to write the first Edinburgh Review in 1755, and joined the Poker Club. In 1764 he left his University position and became tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, with whom he visited France, meeting some of the leading philosophes there, Quesnay, D’Alembert, Turgot and Necker. After settling in Kirkcaldy in 1766, on a pension from Buccleuch, he devoted himself to the writing of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Throughout his life his intellectual interests were wide-ranging, engaging with the scientific study of man across present disciplinary boundaries. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) elaborated on David Hume’s concept of sympathy, sometimes in explicitly gendered ways, and proposed the idea of the ‘impartial spectator’, or the internalised conscience. The political economy of his Wealth of Nations has to be placed in the broader context of his sense of philosophical history, and his rejection of an older republicanism. His study of the workings of a commercial society identified the ‘public good’ as best achieved through the pursuit of individual self-interest, harmonized through the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence. Student notes on his lectures on jurisprudence and history, and also on rhetoric, have survived. He also wrote essays on the evolution of language and on the history of astronomy, posthumously published as Philosophical Essays (1795). In 1778 he accepted an appointment as one of the Commissioners of Customs for Scotland, and spent the remaining period of his life in Edinburgh society. Jane Rendall

Mme de Stae¨l (1766–1817)

Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker was born on 22 April 1766 in Paris. Her Genevan father, Jacques, was finance minister, and her mother, Suzanne (née Curchod), a salonnière. In 1786 she was married to Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein (d.1802), the Swedish ambassador and instituted her own powerful salon. In 1787 she gave birth to the first of five children, the only one certainly her husband’s. Her many lovers included Talleyrand, Narbonne and Benjamin Constant. An influential political activist for the moderates throughout the revolutionary period, she was also a groundbreaking cultural theorist and novelist. Early publications included Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1788), Réflexions sur le procès de la reine (1793), the novel Zulma and Réflexions sur la paix (1794). In 1792 she retreated to Coppet, the Genevan family home, and in 1793 visited England. Staël returned Paris under the Directory, but she and Constant aroused the enmity of Napoleon for their critical stance. Important literary-philosophical publications were Recueil de morceaux détachés (1795); De l’influence des passions (1796); and De La Littérature (1800). The Enlightenment Biographies 749 latter and the novel Delphine (1802) aroused hostility for their political implications. Constant was now expelled from the Tribunate and Staël banished from Paris. From 1803 to 1805 she visited first Germany then Italy, meeting Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm von Schlegel. The latter became tutor to her children at Coppet. Her bestselling novel- travelogue Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807) protested against Napoleonic imperialism whilst mythologizing the woman artist as tragic heroine. In 1810 her principal work, De l’Allemagne, which analysed German Romanticism, was printed but pulped by Napoleon who judged it ‘anti-French’. Exiled from France, she visited Austria, Russia, Sweden and England, where she was lionized when De l’Allemagne was published there in 1813. Réflex- ions sur le suicide (1813) followed. After the fall of Napoleon, she visited Italy again. Byron was amongst the vistors to Coppet in 1816, the year when she secretly married the young John Rocca. However, she died in Paris on 14 July the following year. Posthumous publications included Considérations sur les principaux èvénements de la Révolution française (1818), Oeuvres complètes (1820), and the autobiographical Dix années d’exil. Caroline Franklin

Voltaire (1694–1778)

François-Marie Arouet was born in 1694, the third child of a Parisian legal family. Educated at the elite Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, he quickly became known for his wit and impertinence. Aiming for the top in the realm of letters, he wrote a classical tragedy, Œdipus, which was a huge hit in 1718 (when he adopted the name ‘de Voltaire’), then a national epic, The Henriad. The famous quarrel with the aristocrat Rohan resulted in his banishment and sojourn in England (1726–28), where he developed a wide acquaintance and assiduously acquired the language. His Philosophical Letters (English 1733, French 1734), celebrating English toleration and mixed government as well as trade and science, got him into serious trouble in France. He retreated to live at Cirey in Champagne with Mme du Châtelet, turning with her to the physical sciences and publishing in 1737 his Elements of Newton’s Philosophy. A period of relatively good conduct enabled him to gain entry to the Académie Française in 1746. In 1749 Mme du Châtelet died in childbirth, and Voltaire spent three years at the court of his admirer Frederick of Prussia. He published his major histories, The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and the Essay on Manners and the Spirit of Nations (1756), and contributed articles to Diderot’s great Encyclopedia. In the later 1750s he established himself at ‘Les Délices’ (where he wrote much of Candide (1759)), and acquired the estate of Ferney near Geneva, where he set about practical improvements of every kind. In his seventh decade, and still inexhaustibly productive, he became the champion of individual victims of judicial or sectarian injustice (Calas, Sirven, La Barre), and campaigner for humanitarian and social reforms. The doyen of the Enlightenment became both ‘the sage of Ferney’ and in effect the ﬁrst modern intellectual. He was ﬁnally allowed to visit Paris (after 30 years absence) in 1778, where he was hugely acclaimed, and died in the same year. Robin Howells

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814)

Mercy Otis Warren was one of the ﬁrst American women to publish works on traditional male subjects such as war, politics, and history. Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, she came of age in the politically active Otis family which included James Otis, one of the earliest leaders of colonial resistance against Britain. In 1754 she married James Warren, with whom she had ﬁve children. As the patriot movement grew, family and friends encouraged her to use her considerable literary talents to serve the American cause. Publishing her work anonymously, she issued a series of political satires, poems, and plays, including The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), and The Group (1775), that attacked British corruption and urged Americans to defend their liberties through force of arms, if necessary. 750 Enlightenment Biographies

Later, during the debate over the ratiﬁcation of the U.S. Constitution, she wrote a pamphlet under the pseudonymn, ‘A Columbian Patriot’ (1788), that criticized the proposed government for lacking a bill of rights and removing important powers from local control. In 1790 an edition of Warren’s collected poems and plays appeared under her own name and received great public acclaim. During this time, she continued to work on her magnum opus, a three-volume history of the revolutionary era. By 1805, when she ﬁnally published the History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, her contrarian view of American society, fear of moral decline, and critical treatment of the policies of former Presidents George Washington and John Adams, no longer found a receptive audience. In fact, Adams, who had originally encouraged her to write the work, dismissed the project, saying, ‘History is not the Province of the Ladies’. Only in retrospect does the full scope and impact of Warren’s vision appear in plain view. Rosemarie Zagarri

Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827)

Helen Maria Williams was born in London, the daughter of a Welsh army officer father, Charles and a Scottish mother, Helen (née Hays). Her widowed mother moved to Berwick- on-Tweed, returning to London in 1781. A Presbyterian, Williams became influenced by Unitarian radicalism and the Enlightenment debate on the moral value of the emotions. Prominent Dissenter Andrew Kippis saw her verse tale Edwin and Eltruda through the press when it appeared anonymously in 1782. Guests such as novelist Henry Mackenzie, playwright Joanna Baillie, and writer Dr John Moore frequented the Williams sisters’ literary parties. Her Poems were published in a subscription edition in 1786 (2nd edit. 1791), after An Ode on the Peace (1783) and Peru (1784), the latter dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu, ‘the queen of the Bluestockings’. In 1788 she published A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. Her sentimentalist poetry argued for pacificism and humanitarian reform, and led to a revival of the sonnet. In 1790 she published Julia, A Novel; interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces. That summer a visit to France produced the first of four volumes of her popular Letters from France (1790–93), personal impressions of the revolution. Publishing A Farewell, for Two Years, to England in 1791, Williams returned to France, eventually settling there. Her affair with the married Unitarian businessman, John Hurford Stone, and her liberal politics scandalized the Tory press. Her salon became one of the chief meeting places for the Girondins and British revolutionaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Friends included Alexander Humboldt, whose travels she translated in 1814, the Countess de Genlis, Madame de Helvetius, and Manon Roland. Initially an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution, she later recounted the tragic downfall of her Girondin friends, her own spell in prison and escape to Switzerland. In 1795 Williams translated Paul et Virginie by J.H. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, and published a second series of four volumes of Letters from France concluding the following year. 1798 saw her Tour in Switzerland, and she continued publishing poetry, translations and reflections on French affairs until her death on 15 December, 1827. Caroline Franklin

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97)

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was born into a middle-class London family which over the course of her childhood descended into near- penury. The eldest girl of seven children, Wollstonecraft sought employment at a young age, scrabbling a living from jobs typical of women of her class: lady’s companion, needlewoman, teacher, governess. In the mid 1780s, while running a girls’ school at Newington Green, north of London, she became attached to a community of leftwing Enlightenment Biographies 751

Protestants – Rational Dissenters, or Unitarians as they were later known – whose radical Enlightenment ideals strongly influenced her. About this time, she also turned to writing for an income. Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was conven- tionally didactic, but her next, a novel titled Mary, A Fiction (1788), contained strong intimations of her feminism. The outbreak of the French Revolution excited her politically, as it did so many in Britain, but it also presented her with a golden opportunity. In 1788 she had begun working for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, writing regularly for his Analytical Review. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his attack on the Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft, encouraged by Johnson, replied to Burke with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), following that up with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). With these two political works she became very famous, possibly the best-known woman writer in the world. At this time she was in a romantic liaison with the painter Henry Fuseli, which ended unhappily in 1792. She went to Paris, to witness the Revolution first-hand, and there wrote An Historical and Moral View … of the French Revolution (1794). She also became the lover of an American army captain, Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a child, Fanny. The relationship foundered and Wollstonecraft attempted suicide. Imlay then persuaded her to undertake a business trip to Scandinavia for him: a journey that resulted in her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). On returning, Wollstonecraft found Imlay living with a new mistress and again attempted suicide. Finally reconciled to the separation from him, she settled into writing and tending Fanny until, in 1796, she acquired a new lover, the radical philosopher William Godwin. Pregnant by Godwin, she married him in March 1797, and died seven months later, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, the future Mary Shelley. In 1798 her final, unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, was published posthumously by Godwin, along with a memoir of his wife which revealed her unorthodox sexual history. Wollstonecraft’s image was badly tarnished, and remained so until her rehabilitation by women’s suffrage activists in the late nineteenth century. Barbara Taylor Index

Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 15, 16 aristocracy, 193, 306–25 academic institutions, women in, 383 aristocratic women, 622 actresses, 610–29 political influence, 570, 571–2, 574–5, Adams, Abigail, 668 577, 579, 580 Adams, John, 668, 678 Aristotle, 397–8 Addison, Joseph, 34, 292 Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece, 140, 147–8, Address to the People of England (Macaulay), 149 540–1 artifice, 137–8 Adèle et Théodore (Genlis), 252, 317 versus nature, 10–15 Advice to the Female Sex in General (Grigg), Association Movement, 573–4 149 Astell, Mary, 42, 312, 355–6, 357–70 Advice to Young Ladies (LePrince de biography, 716–17 Beaumont), 315 critique of Shaftesbury’s liberal Aeneid (Virgil), 180 permissiveness, 363–4 agency, 434, 435–6 early life, 358 and evangelicalism, 450–5 on education, 359–60, 361 and Quaker women, 439 on Enlightenment principles, 366 without autonomy, 438–43 feminist works, 359, 363 Aitkin, Lucy, Epistles on Women, 7 influence of, 366–7 Alcuin (Brown), 675 Letters concerning the Love of God, 361 Alexander, William, 82 in London, 358–9, 367–8 History of Women, 36, 71, 79, 118, 678 on marriage, 312, 362–3 Algarotti, Francesco, Newtonianism for patrons and supporters, 360 Ladies, 272 as a philosopher, 364–5 Allestree, Richard, The Ladies Calling, 144 published works, 359 Amar y Borbón, Josefa reading, 368 biography, 719–20 and religion, 361, 363 Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Serious Proposal, 143, 312, 313, 359, 360, Women, 403 361 ‘Amazonianism’, 42 Serious Proposal Part II, 361–2, 542 Amazons, 420 attachment between the sexes, 21–2 American Philosophical Society, 652, 660 Augustine, Saint, The Trinity, 412, 419 American Revolution, 655, 667–8 ‘Aura seminalis’, 54 Analytical Review, 503, 552 Austen, Jane, education, 231 Ancient Society (Morgan), 129 authenticity, 137 Anderson, John, 594 autonomy, 435, 436, 706–7, 711–12 biography, 716 Avantcoureur (weekly), 211 Année merveilleuse (Coyer), 247 Avis d’une mere á sa fille (Lambert), 245 anthropology, 98 Ayala, López de, 403 anti-feminist ideas, 47 Anti-Jacobin Review, 57, 551–2, 554 Baillie, Joanna, 329, 336 anti-slavery activism, 576 Ballard, George, 463 Apologie de la science des dames, 375–6 Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora, 270–1 Apology of Women (Joyes y Blake), 404 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 414, 474–92, 712 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (Hays), biography, 717 506, 577 Devotional Pieces, 483 Arar y Borbón, Josefa, Discourse of women’s devotional theory, 482–3 physical and moral education, 191 Poems, 477 752 Index 753

on pubic worship, 486–7 boarding schools, 228–30 recent work on, 475 Book of the City of Ladies (Pizan), 417 on religion, 484–5 Borromeo, Clelia Grillo, 271 religious background, 476–8 Boscawen, Frances Evelyn, biography, 720 Sins of Government, 519 Boswell, James, 161 on the Wakeﬁeldian controversy, 485–6 The Botanic Garden (Darwin), 150 on women writers, 475 botany, and sex education, 150–1 Barthelemy, Louis de, 212, 213 Boudier de Villemert, Pierre-Joseph, 213 Bassi, Laura, 261, 265–70, 279 bourgeois public sphere, 610 biography, 717–18 Brant, Clare, 301 Battersby, Christine, 55 Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani Battle of the Sexes, 126 (Bianchi), 279 Bayle, Pierre, 507 Briquet, Fortunée, Dictionnaire historique, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 372 259 Beattie, James, 23 Britain Elements of Moral Science, 36 after 1688, 355–6 Essay on the Nature and Immutability of education of girls, 224–42 Truth, 12 feminism, 42 letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 23 Broughan, Henry, 337 ‘Beauty and the Beast’, 308–11 Brown, Charles Brockdenè, Alcuin, 675 Beauzeé, Nicolas, 208–9 Brunot, Ferdinand, 195 The Bee (Buchan), 329, 336–7 Brunton, Mary, 328 Bell, Margaret, 452 Buchan, Lord, The Bee, 329, 336–7 Bellaigue, Christina de, 230 Buffer, Pére, 206 Bennett, John, 35, 39 Buffet, Marguerite, Nouvelles observations sur Letters, 230 la langue Franc[,]oisè, 378 Strictures on Female Education, 228–9 Buffon, 84, 124 Bentham, Jeremy, 168, 169, 591, 594–5, 600 De L’homme, 19 Bentivoglio Davia, Laura, 260, 261, 265–7, Burke, Edmund, 156, 167, 170 268–9, 272, 275, 279–81 biography, 720–1 ailments, 281–2 Catherine Macaulay on, 521 biography, 724 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of marriage, 273–4 our Ideas of the Sublime and the and Zanotti, 275–8 Beautiful, 124 Berkeley, Eliza, biography, 718–19 Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, 32, Bewell, Alan, 151 552 Bianchi, Giovanni, 266, 275, 278, 281–2 Burney, Frances, 139, 231 Brief History of the Life of Catterina on Elizabeth Vesey, 294 Vizzani, 279 Butler, George, 595 Bible, feminine symbols, 429 Biblical criticism, 429 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, biography, biological essentialism, 679 721 Biron, Duc de, 161 Caledonian culture, 86–8 Black Dwarf, 601 Calidore, 593, 594, 596–7 Blair, Hugh, 159, 164, 166 Cambis, Madame de, 642 Critical Dissertation, 85 Campbell, Peter Robert, 308 ‘Blas Bleu, or conversation’ (More), 288 Campomanes, Pedro Rodriguez, 401 ‘bluestockings’, 262, 288–305, 337–8, 358, Cappe, Catherine, 338 414, 463–4, 700 Cappe, Newcome, 329 conversation, 290–7, 301 Carlyle, Alexander, 8 and didactic literature, 471 Carter, Elizabeth, 231, 233, 466, 467 and education, 297–301 as a classical scholar, 291 literary dialogue, 301 letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 291 and philosophy, 292 letters from Elizabeth Montagu, 292, 293 754 Index

Carter, Philip, 137 Claeys, Gregory, 73 Carteret, Sophia, 309–10 Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches, Cartesian moment, 351, 354, 371, 378–80 599 ‘Cartesian women’, 262, 265–70 classics, teaching of, 233–4 Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, 372 Clement , Elisabeth Marie, Dialogue de la Castle, Terry, 138 Princess Sc[,]avante, 376–8 Catholicism, 416–33 Clément, Pierre-Paul, 176 and feminism, 417–21, 429–30 Cobbett, William, 656 and French education, 243–4 Cockburn, Catherine, 463, 464 Catrach, Nina, 206 Coelebs in Search of a Wife (More), 320 Cavaignac, Madame de, 197 Cohen, Michele, 163, 192 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Coleman, Deidre, 47 Newcastle, 721–2 Collins, Anthony, 500 celibacy, 427–8 colonial period, suffrage during, 62 Chalus, Elaine, 571 Colwill, Elizabeth, 638 Chapone, Hester commercial society, 101, 102–3 on conversation, 295, 299–300 Common Sense (Paine), 668 on Elizabeth Rowe, 468 communication networks, 351 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 8, comparative history, 72–3 14, 143, 468, 469–70 Comparative View of the State and Faculties of on marriage, 470 Man with Those of the Animal World Chappuzeau, Samuel, 381 (Gregory), 9, 15–23 Charpentier, C.A.T. Complaints of the Poor People of England Essai sur la mélancolie, 57 (Dyer), 592 on Rousseau, 57 Condorcet, Marquis de, biography, 722–3 chastity, 143 conduct books, 5, 8, 13, 144, 247, 291, 307, conduct book definition, 144 308 Châtelet, Emilie Gabrielle du, 246 Madame de la Fite, 316 biography, 722 Confessions (Rousseau), 137, 166, 169, 174, Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini 178, 179, 180, 182 (Tarabotti), 425–7 conjectural history, 131, 695–6 Chernock, Arianne, 567 and women writers, 117–20, 129 Chesterfield, Lord, Letters to His Son, 8, 37, conjugal love, 637, 640 168 Conseils a une amie (Puisieux), 249 Child, Gardner, 685 Constantini, Guiseppe Antonio, 272 chivalry, 6–7, 33, 35, 40, 72, 82, 695 Constitutional Politics (Williams), 599–600 Ferguson on, 79 convergence, between the sexes, 3 Stuart on, 80 conversation, 77, 83, 190, 211–12, 288, 289 The Christian Hero (Steele), 165 and the ‘bluestockings’, 290–7, 301 Christian Platonism, 352, 478 Chapone on, 295 Christianity, 423–4 and spelling, 208 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 127, 270–1 Conversations d’Emilie (d’Épinay), 251–2 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 308 (Fontenelle), 271 citizenship, 570, 573, 587–609, 612–13 Cooper, Thomas in the French Revolution, 630–48 biography, 723 and marriage, 630–48 Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective, 590 Citton, Yves, 201 Corinne (Staël), 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62 The Civilising Process (Elias), 73 melancholy in, 62–4 civility, definitions of, 121–2 Cornara, Elena Lucrezia, 383, 429 civilization, 9–10, 19, 43, 70–2, 73, 117–35 cosmopolitanism, 108, 109, 112 and virtue, 119–25 Cotin, Charles, 210 and women’s writing, 71 Cottagers of Glenburnie (Hamilton), 338–9 civilizing influence of women, 77–8, 103, Courcelles, Anne-Théresè see Lambert, 106 Marquise de Index 755

Cours complet d’instruction (Miremont), Dialogue de la Princess Sc[,]avante (Clement), 247–8 276–8 Coyer, Année merveilleuse, 247 Dialogues Concerning Education (Fordyce), 38 Creech, Gregory, 8 Dialogues of the Dead (Montagu), 301 Critical Dissertation (Blair), 85 dictionaries, 202, 204, 206 The Critical Review, 578 Dictionnaire historique (Briquet), 259 Crocker, Hannah Mather, 682 Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 372 Cromwell, Oliver, 169 didactic literature, 469 Cullen family, 327–8, 331–2 and the bluestockings, 471 and the Millar family, 347 Diderot, Denis, 97, 248 Cullen, Margaret, 328 biography, 725 Home, 331–4 on gallantry, 103 on marriage, 331–4 Jacques le Fataliste, 97 Cullen, William, 327, 331, 650, 652 La Religieuse, 97 Currie, William, 651 Le Fils Naturel, 54 Le Neveude Rameau, 250 Dacier, Anne Lefevre, 269 and religion, 100 Darby, Abiah, 449 review of Thomas’ Essai, 124 Darsant, Madeleine see Puisieux, Madeleine on ‘savages’, 101 de Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 72, Darwin, Erasmus 79, 109–11, 112 biography, 723–4 Sur les Femmes, 71, 97, 98–107 The Botanic Garden, 150 women as ‘thermometers’, 98 Loves of the Plants, 150 dimorphism, 55 Davia, Giovanni Antonio, 274 Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de Day, Thomas, 166 l’onégalité (Rousseau), 129 biography, 724–5 Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women De la Littérature (Staël), 57 (Amar), 403 De la santé des gend de lettres (Roussel), 55 A discourse on the Love of our country (Price), De L’Allemagne (Staël), 118 538 De l’excellence des hommes (Poulain de la Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality Barre), 247 (Rousseau), 43 De L’homme (Buffon), 19 Discourse of women’s physical and moral debating societies, 567, 574, 578 education (Arar y Borbón), 191 Declaration of Independence, 668 disembodied mind, 404 Declaration of the rights of man, 656 Dissenters, 480, 481, 482, 487, 494–5, 539, Defense of women (Feijoo)., 390 542, 588 Defoe, 366 Dissenting tradition, 233 Delphine (Staël), 555 dissimulation, 11 d’Épinay, Louise ‘distinction of sex’, 3, 6 biography, 726 division of labour, 81 Conversations d’Emilie, 251–2 Dodd, William, 166–7 Desan, Suzanne, 568 d’Oliver, Abbé, 206 Descartes, 354, 378 domestic (home) education, 225–31 Meditations, 270 domesticity, 36–7, 101–2, 193 Principles of Philosophy, 270 Dotoli, Giovanni, 424 d’Espinassy, Mlle, Essai sur l’éducation des Du célibat volontaire (Suchon), 427–8 demoiselles, 251 Du Pont, Nicolas, 205–6 d’Este, Aurelia, 270 DuChatelet, Madame, 260 determinism, 71 Duchet, Michéle, 84, 98 Deverell, Mary, 461 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 208, 210 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, 574–5, Dunbar, James, 89 614 Duncombe, John, The Feminiad, 462 Devotional Pieces (Barbauld), 483 Dundas, Henry, 330 devotional writings, 461, 479 Dupin, Madame, 117, 126, 246 756 Index

Dupont, Félicité, 196 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Dwyer, John, 161 (Godwin), 503 Dyer, George, 597–8 Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex Complaints of the Poor People of England, 592 (Gisborne), 9 Entretiens sur l’orthographe franc[,]oise Earle, Rebecca, 504 (Roche), 213–14 Eccles, John, 495–6 Epicurean philosophy, 421, 696–8 Edgeworth, Maria, 474, 555 Epistles on Women (Wollstonecraft), 7 Edgeworth, R.L., 236, 474 Epstein, James, Radical Expression, 592 Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly equality, 43, 126 Society, 338 Gournay on, 373–4 Edinburgh Review, 330, 335 intellectual, 389 education, 142, 189–92, 541–2 Macaulay on, 538 and the ‘bluestockings’, 297–301 in the public sphere, 400–404 female education in Britain, 224–42 Spain, 401 female education in France, 243–58 spiritual, 391 female education, and spelling, 197–9 Suchon on, 427 gender difference and equality, 234–5 ‘equality of the sexes’, 371 Latin in, 199–201, 202–3, 207, 232, Essai sur la mélancolie (Charpentier), 57 233–4, 236–7 Essai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit des male, 225 femmes (Thomas), 76, 78 method in, 231–4 Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles method and ‘modern’ education, 236–7 (d’Espinassy), 251 Poulain de la Barre on, 379 Essay on a course of liberal education public/private debate, 225–31 (Priestly), 500 ‘system’, 237 Essay on the Government of Children teaching of the classics, 233–4 (Nelson), 147 and virtue, 226, 232 Essay on the History of Civil Society and women’s cultural roles, 190 (Ferguson), 13, 78, 166 writing on, 190–1 Essay on the Nature and Immutability of effeminacy, 75, 85, 125 Truth (Beattie), 12 and sensibility, 158 An Essay on the Origin of Evil (King), 547 Égalité des hommes et des femmes (Gournay), Essay on the Writings and Genius of 423–6 Shakespeare (Montagu), 291 Eger, Elizabeth, 261 ‘Essex Result’, 677 Elements of Moral Science (Beattie), 36 European Magazine, 527 Elements of Morality (Wollstonecraft), 145 evangelicalism, and agency, 450–5 Elias, Norbert, The Civilising Process, 73 Exemplary novels (Zayas), 391–2 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 594 Emile (Rousseau), 54, 137 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 698 Encyclopédie, 208, 209 family, 129, 695 Enfield, William, biography, 725–6 A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Gregory), Engels, Frederick, 129–33 5, 8–13, 31 The Origin of the Family, 129–33 Wollstonecraft on, 31 England Feijoo, Benito J. Enlightenment, 357 background and writings, 395 stage, 618 biography, 726–7 English Review, 503 compared to Poulain de la Barre, 394, Enlightenment 396–7, 398–9 broadening of concept, 693 defense of gender equality, 395–6, 398 influence, 47–8 Defense of women, 390, 392 as a value system, 707 influences on, 392–3 The Enlightenment in National Context on Malebranche’s theory, 398 (Porter and Teich), 356 rhetorical construction, 393 Index 757 on women’s intellectual equality, 393–4 on Reform Bill 1832, 341 Fell, Margaret, 447 social life, 335–6 Female Biography (Hays), 506–7 flow, in Rousseau’s works, 183–4 Female Friend, 680 Fontana, Biancamaria, 330, 331 female intellectuals, 54 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 277 female nature Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, Gregory on, 12, 13 271 as human nature, 23–7 foppery, 40, 41 The Female Quixote (Lennox), 224, 462 Fordyce, David, 6, 39 The Female Reader (Wollstonecraft), 10 Dialogues Concerning Education, 38 Female Restoration (Haley), 574 Fordyce, James, 33, 158, 160 female solidarity, 249, 250, 254 on marriage, 36 female submission, 242, 640 Sermons to Young Women, 8–9, 31 The Feminiad (Duncombe), 462 Foronda, Valentin de, 401 feminine goodness, 413 Fothergill, Samuel, 449, 450, 451 feminine influence, 76, 81 Foulke, John, 651 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 438 ‘four stages theory’, 13 feminine symbols, in the Bible, 429 Fox, Charles James, 164, 167, 574–5 femininity, 54 France, 73, 572–3 Gregory on, 11 effeminacy, 82 feminism, 389–90, 705–15 female education, 243–58 backlash against, 578 female writers, 259 Britain, 42 learned women, 3, 53 and Catholicism, 417–21 Louis XIV, 355 prior to the Enlightenment, 390 reform of orthography (spelling), 193, feminist discourse, 385 196, 201–6 feminist writing, and learning, 375 stage, 617–18 feminists, male, 567 Francis, Sir Philip, 156, 170 Feminists Rethink the Self, 435 Franklin, Caroline, 521 ‘feminization’, 75, 79, 82 French Revolution, 128, 707 Femme savante, 53 citizenship in, 630–48 Fénelon, 191, 313 and female rights, 553–4, 565, 576, 612 on female education, 244 marriage in, 630–48 Telemachus, 180, 313–14 Frend, William, 499–500, 502 Traité de l’éducation des filles, 244, 245, biography, 728 313 and Mary Hays, 505 Ferguson, Adam Fréron, 215 on chivalry, 79 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 438 Essay on the History of Civil Society, 13, 78, Fumaroli, 200 166 Fessenden, Thomas, 680 Gale Jones, John, 596 feudalism, 80, 82 gallantry, 5–7, 30, 31, 33–47, 82, 102, 695, Findlen, Paula, 261 697 Fite, Marie Elisabeth de la Diderot on, 103 biography, 727 enlightened British, 33–4 conduct books, 316 French influence, 33–4 as governess, 316 Shaftesbury on, 34 Fletcher, Eliza, 326, 468–9 Wollstonecraft on, 44–5 on Anne Grant, 341–2 and women writers, 6 biography, 727–8 Gassendi, 697 Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Gay, Peter, 404, 649 Society, 338 gender memoir of her daughter, 334–5 as a contested concept, 371 network of friends, 328–30 in the pubic sphere, 380–4 758 Index gender differences Grafton, Anthony, 231 and equal education, 234–5 Grant, Anne, 329, 331 nervous system, 54 on Eliza Fletcher, 341–2 gender divisions, 41 Grassi, Marie-Claire, 7, 196 gender equality, 353 Graves, Richard, The Spiritual Quixote, 462 Feijoo on, 395–6 Gregory, John, 5, 77–8, 653 gender functionalism, 5 biography, 731 gender relations, 70 Comparative View of the State and Faculties gender roles, 101–2 of Man with Those of the Animal gendered subjectivity, 136 World, 9, 15–23, 86 gendering of genre, 175 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, 8–15, genius, 4, 55–6, 59, 62 31 Genlis, Felicité de, 198, 212 Griffith, Elizabeth, biography, 731–2 Adèle et Théodore, 252, 317 Grigg, John, Advice to the Female Sex in biography, 728–9 General, 149 as governess, 317–19 Grimm, Friedrich-Melchior, 97 on marriage, 318 Grubb, Sarah, 454 genre, gendering of, 175 Guest, Harriet, 119, 157, 535 Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse, 195 biography, 729 Haakonssen, Lisbeth, 16 George III, King, 315–16 Habermas, Jurgen, 290, 610, 698 Germania (Tacitus), 87 Haley, E., Female restoration, 574 Germany, 87, 132 Hamilton, Cicely, 47 Gibbon, 224 Hamilton, Elizabeth Gisborne, Thomas, Enquiry into the Duties of biography, 732 the Female Sex, 9 Cottagers of Glenburnie, 338–9 Glazebrook, James, 480 Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 577 Gleadle, Kathryn, 326 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 338–9 Glorious Revolution, Macaulay on, 530–1 Harth, Erica, 262 Glorious Revolution Society, 128 Hartley, David, Theory of the Human Mind, Godwin, William 500 biography, 729–30 Hayley, William, The Triumphs of Temper, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 472 503, 553 Hays, Mary, 31, 42, 237, 493–518 and Mary Hays, 504 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, 506, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of 577 the Rights of Woman, 30, 43–4, 47, biography, 732–3 331, 551 and Dissent, 494–5, 501 Gohier, 637 early life, 494 Goldsmith, Oliver, 159 Female Biography, 506–7 Gonda, Caroline, 623 and Franco-British revolutionary politics, Goodman, Dena, 193, 290, 623 494 Gouges, Olympe de, 612, 656 and Frend, 505 biography, 730 and Gilbert Wakefield, 498–9 Gournay, Marie de, 372 and Godwin, 504 biography, 730–1 and Hugh Worthington, 501 Égalité des hommes et des femmes, 423–6 Letters and Essays, Moral and on equality, 373–5 Miscellaneous, 501–3 references to, 375 letters to John Eccles, 495–6 religious attitude, 423, 424 and Mary Wollstonecraft, 46–7, 503 governesses, 26, 230, 247, 309–10, 314–16 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 504–6 de la Fite, 316 Memoirs of Queens, 507 Genlis, 317–19 novels, 496 LePrince de Beaumont, 314–15 and religion, 494–5 More, 319–20 and Robert Robinson, 496–8 Index 759

Southey on, 493 Il Cortegiano (Castiglione), 372 The Victim of Prejudice, 577 independence, 591 Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess, 462 individual, and nation, 633 Helvétius, Anne Catherine, 656 inﬁdelity, 36 Hickey, Margarita, 404 and religion, 25 Hillsborough, Mary, 310 inheritance, 130 Hints on the Education of a Princess (More), intellectual equality, 389 31 Feijoo on, 393–4 Histoire des deux Indies (Raynal), 71, 72, intellectuals, 54–5 104–8 female, 54, 55, 576–7 women in, 106 Introduction to Botany (Wakeﬁeld), 150 historians, female, 260, 695 Introduction to the History of Great Britain historical discourse, women in, 76–9 and Ireland (Macpherson), 86 Historical and Moral View of the French Ireland, 556–9 Revolution (Wollstonecraft), 31 Italy, 265–87 An Historical View of the English Government aristocratic women and science, (Millar), 83 270–2 historical writing, 523, 555 women in academic institutions, 383 history and liberty, 539–40 Jacobs, Margaret, 434, 707 study of, 254 Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot), 97 History of America (Robertson), 78 Janowitz, Anne, 475 History of England (Hume), 525 Jardine, Alexander, 39, 227, 234, 589–90 History of England (Macaulay), 519, 520, biography, 735 524–31, 539–40, 552, 696 Jardine, Lisa, 231 history of women, 70, 76–7 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 655, 667 limits of progress in, 79–83 Jeffrey, Francis, 336 History of Women (Alexander), 36 Jerome, Saint, 424 Hitchcock, Tim, 147, 148 Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso), 180 Hodgson, William, 589 Jesuits, 54, 248 Holcroft, Thomas, 733 Jodin, Marie-Madeleine, 610 home birth movement, 442 autobiography, 615 Home (Cullen), 331–4 biography, 736 Home, Henry see Kames, Lord early life, 612 homo-eroticism, in Rousseau’s works, feminist writing, 618 179–81 imprisonment, 614 Hubert de Sevrac (Robinson), 619 love affairs, 614 human nature, 12 on marriage, 622 female nature as, 23–7 and Schulenberg, 614, 616 humanitarianism, 575–6, 579 temperament, 615–16 Hume, David Vues legislatives pour les femmes, 613, 614, biography, 734–5 618, 619–20 compared to Macaulay, 525 Johnson, Claudia L., 157 on gallantry, 6 Johnson, Joseph, 145 History of England, 525 Johnson, Pauline, 707 on male sensibility, 163 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 139, 234 on modesty, 37 The Rambler, 460 On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Jones, Lady Catherine, 360 Sciences, 30 Jones, Vivien, 9, 13, 309 Treatise of Human Nature, 12 Jordan, Constance, 374 on women, 76–7 Joyes y Blake, Inés Hunt, Margaret, 10 Apology of Women, 404 Hutcheson, Francis, 81 biography, 719 Hutton, Sarah, 520 Julie (Rousseau), 166, 174, 182–3, 192, hysteria, 99–100, 651, 653 250–1, 478 760 Index

Kames, Lord 17th century, 357–8 biography, 734 France, 3, 53 Sketches of the History of Man, Book I, 14, Marinella on, 373 78, 86 learning on women, 81 and feminist writing, 375 Kant, Immanuel, 711–12 and women, 380–1 biography, 735 Lectures on Education (Williams), 232 Kelly, Gary, 73 Lekain, 417 kenosis, 438 Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote, 224, Kerber, Linda, 658 462 Kindersley, Jemima, 71, 78 LePrince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie, 191, King, William, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, 247 547 Advice to Young Ladies, 315 Kingsborough family, 306 biography, 718 Kirkland, John Thornton, 675 as governess, 314–15 Knott, Sarah, 566 Magasins, 247 Knox, Vicesimus, 39, 160, 162, 163–4, 225, The Young Ladies Magazine, 110, 310 229 Triumph of Truth, 314 biography, 736–7 Young Misses Magazine, 308, 310 Liberal Education, 226–7, 232–3 Les Femmes Savantes (Molière), 53 Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Laclos), 192 La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme Les Moeurs (Toussaint), 315 (Puisieux), 248 L’Esclache, Louis de, 202, 203–4 La nobilità et excelenza delle donne Lespinasse, Julie de, 262 (Marinella), 421–3 L’Esprit des Lois (Montesquieu), 133 La Religieuse (Diderot), 97 Letter to the Women of England (Robinson), La Roche, Sophie von, 262 613 The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 316 letters, 542 labour, and women, 131–2 Letters (Bennett), 230 Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons Letters concerning the Love of God (Astell), Dangereuses, 192 361 The Ladies Calling (Allestree), 144 Letters on Education (Macaulay), 143–4, 519, The Ladies Dispensatory, 149 534, 538, 541–2, 544, 546, 577 laissez-faire economics, 120 Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous Lamb, Frederick, 327 (Hays), 501–3 Lambert, Anne-Théresè Marquise de Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton), 577 Avis d’une mere à sa fille, 245–6 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind biography, 737 (Chapone), 8, 14 on female education, 245 Letters to his Kinsfolk (Lockhart), 337 Landes, Joan B., 565 Letters to his son (Chesterfield), 8, 37 Langford, Paul, 233 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de Jean- Laqueur, Thomas, 99 Jacques Rousseau (de Staël), 57, 58–9 Lartigaut, Antoine, 202 Levite of Ephraim (Rousseau), 181 Latin, 198, 199–201, 202–3, 204, 207, 232, Lewis, Judith, 580 233–4, 236–7 Liberal Education (Knox), 226–7 Lawrence, James Henry, 737–8 liberalism, 667 Le Doeuff, Michele, 434 libertinism, 313, 315, 317 Le Fils Naturel (Diderot), 54 liberty, 525–6 Le Masson le Golft, Mlle, 248 and history, 539–40 Lettres relatives à l’éducation, 248 Macaulay on, 538 Le Neveude Rameau (Diderot), 250 Lindsey, Theophilus, 495, 500 leadership, 462, 472 literary dialogue, and the ‘bluestockings’, The Learned Ladies (Molière), 53 301 learned women, 39, 225 ‘literary intemperance’, 55 Index 761 literary society, 698–700 McCarthy, William, 474 literature review, 692–3 Mack, Phyllis, 692, 694 Lives of Illustrious Men (Plutarch), 174, 180 Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 57 Lock, Frederica, 316 McLaughlin, Blandine, 97 Locke, John, 362 Macmahon, Thomas, 168 on education, 146 Macpherson, James, Introduction to the influence of, 528–9 History of Great Britain and Ireland, 86 Reasonableness of Christianity, 365 Maese, Sarah, 291 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 158, Magasins (LePrince de Beaumont), 247 226 Magné, Bernard, 197, 199 Two Treatises of Government, 528, 681 Mahmood, Saba, 440 Lockhart, John Gibson, Letters to his Maintenon, Madame de, 313 Kinsfolk, 337 Major, Emma, 293 Lofft, Capel, on Mary Hays, 493 male feminists, 567, 587–609 Logan, George, 650 male sensibility, Hume on, 163 London, 367 male superiority, 680 London Corresponding Society, 587–8, 589 male writers, 18th century France, 3–4 Louis XIV, 355 Malebranche’s theory, 398 Lounger (periodical), 160, 162 The Man of Feeling (Mackenzie), 57 love Mancini, Hortense, 312 physical and moral, 124–5, 132 Mander, Jenny, 71 and power, 102 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 698 Love in Excess (Haywood), 462 manhood, and sensibility, 161 Loves of the Plants (Darwin), 150 Manzolini, Anna Morandi, 278 Lucretius, 421 ‘Marginality, Melancholy and the Learned Woman’, 3 Macaulay, Catherine, 118, 119, 309, Marie Antoinette, 621–2 523–37, 538–50, 712 Marinella, Lucrezia, 372–3 Address to the People of England, 540–1 influence on Feijoo, 392 biography, 738 La nobilità et excelenza delle donne, 421–3 compared to Hume, 525–6 on learned women, 373 on education, 541–2, 546–8 marriage, 36, 79, 110 education of, 231 Astell on, 312, 362–3 on equality, 538, 541–2, 546–8 Chapone on, 470 gender-neutrality of work, 533 and citizenship, 630–48 on the Glorious Revolution, 530–1 as a civil contract, 636 historical writing, 523–4 companionship within, 132–3 History of England, 519, 520, 524–31, Cullen on, 331–4 539–40, 552, 696 Engels on, 130 Letters on Education, 143–4, 519, 534, 538, in the French Revolution, 630–48 541–2, 544, 546, 577 Genlis on, 318 on liberty, 538, 539–40 Gregory on, 11 marriage, 524 Hutcheson on, 81 millenarian perfectionism, 543 Jodin on, 622 Observations on the Reflections of the Right and regeneration, 637 Hon. Edmund Burke, 521, 538 Robinson on, 622 patriotism, 521, 523–4 as a social and civil contract, 632–6 on political priority of the individual, as a social and political obligation, 633–4 531 Wollstonecraft on, 133 on politics, 540–1 Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminine religion, 538–50, 539, 542–6, 546–8 Imagination (Taylor), 494 theology of, 532 masochism, in Rousseau’s work, 179 Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, Mason, Priscilla, 674 519, 538, 546, 547–8 masquerade, 138 762 Index maternity, 18–19, 72, 100 Dialogues of the Dead, 301 Mede, Joseph, 543 Essay on the Writings and Genius of medical literature, 148–9 Shakespeare, 291 medicine, 649–66 Hester Thrale on, 294 female difference in, 659, 661 letter from Elizabeth Carter, 291 nervous physiology, 650 letter to Hannah More, 138 and sensibility, 650, 654, 660–1 letters to Elizabeth Carter, 292, 293 vascular system, 652 Wraxall on, 297–8 Meditations (Descartes), 270 Montbart, Madame de, Sophie, ou Mee, Jon, 475 l’éducation, 251 melancholy, 56–7, 60 Montesquieu, 5 in Corinne, 62–3 biography, 739–40 de Staël on, 62–4 L’Esprit des Lois, 133 and Rousseau, 57–9 moral separation, 611 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the The Moral Sex (Steinbrugge), 4 Rights of Woman (Godwin), 30, 43–4, Moran, Mary Catherine, 5, 32, 289, 326, 649 47, 331, 551 on Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 73 Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Hays), 504–6 More, Hannah, 138, 143, 228, 234, 294–5, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton), 296, 579–80 338–9 ‘Blas Bleu, of conversation’, 288 Memoirs of Queens (Hays), 507 Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 320 menopause, 100 on Elizabeth Vesey, 294 mental illness, 58, 59–60 on goals of the bluestockings, 298–9 method as governess, 319–20 in education, 231–4 Hints on the Education of a Princess, 31 and ‘modern’ education, 236–7 and religion, 319 Midgely, Clare, 576 on social diversity, 296–7 Mill, J.S., The Subjection of Women, 132 Strictures on Female Education, 319, 579 Millar family, and the Cullen family, 347 Thoughts on the manners of the Great, 320 Millar, John, 37, 327 on women’s education, 235, 2334 biography, 738–9 Morgan, Lady Sydney see Owenson, Sydney family, 327 Morgan, Lewis H., Ancient Society, 129 An Historical View of the English Muraire, 635 Government, 83 mythology, 417, 429 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 34, 36, 73, 78, 82, 327 Namierite school, 571 Millar, Margaret, 328 Napoleon, 554, 555 Millar, Robina, 328, 329 Narcisse (Rousseau), 176 and Benjamin Rush, 660 Nash, Richard ‘Beau’, 159 millenarian perfectionism, 543 nation, and the individual, 633 Millenium Hall (Scott), 300 National Magazine, 671 mind-body dualism, 709–10 national politics, 519 Miremont, Comtesse de nationalism, 551 Cours complet d’instruction, 247–8 USA, 661 Traité de l’education des femmes, 247–8 ‘nations’, 89–90 The Missionary (Owenson), 556 Native Americans, 657–8 mistress system, 307–8 The Natural Daughter (Robinson), 578 modernity, 40, 120 natural history of man, and women, 15–23 modesty, 109, 144, 440 natural law, 13 Hume on, 37 natural rights theories, 560, 588–9, 592, Molière, 354 681–2 Les Femmes savantes, 53, 381 ‘natural’ state of society, 5 Montagu, Elizabeth, 23, 288, 296, 470 nature, 9–10, 19–20 biography, 739 Gregory on, 22 Index 763

of men and women, 380 Paine, Thomas versus artifice, 10–15 biography, 742 Necker, Suzanne, 118, 120, 207, 212 Common Sense, 668 biography, 741 The Rights of Man, 588, 669 Nelson, Horatio, 554 Pamela (Richardson), 469 Nelson, James, Essay on the Government of Parsons, James, 159 Children, 147 Pascoe, Judith, 621 nervous disorders, 651, 652–3 passivity, in Rousseau’s work, 175–9 nervous system, 650 paternalism, 11 gender differences, 54–5 patriarchy, 130, 706 networks, 351 patriotism, 125–7, 551–64, 637–9, 641 ‘New Lights’, 451 Pauw, Cornelius de, Recherches New-York Daily Advertiser, 674 Philosophiques sur les Américains, 85 New-York Weekly Museum, 67 Payton, Catherine, 49, 448, 449–50 Newlyn, Lucy, 475 pedagogical enlightenment, and spelling, Newton, Isaac 206–10 Optics, 266 pedantry, 213 Principia, 266 Peisley, Mary, 448–9 Newtonianism for Ladies (Algarotti), 272 Pennsylvania Gazette, 651 Norgate, Thomas Starling, 591, 592, 593–4 Percy, Carol, 230 biography, 741 Perry, Ruth, 125 Norris, 362, 364 Petty, William, 310 Nouvelles observations sur la langue philanthropic activism, 338–40, 580 franc[,]oise (Buffet), 378 philosophers novels, 13, 462, 471, 579 Astell as, 364–5 of Mary Hays, 496 women as, 272–7, 693 philosophes, 53–4 Observations on the Reflections of the Right A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Hon. Edmund Burke (Macaulay), 521 Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful ‘oceanic interculture’, 649 (Burke), 124 O’Gorman, Frank, 571 Philosophical Nosography (Pinel), 57 On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Pufendorf), philosophy, 42 13 and ‘bluestockings’, 292 On the Equality of the Sexes (Poulain de la Phlipon, Manon see Roland de la Platière, Barre), 379 Manon On Germany (Staël), 555 phonetic spelling, 207, 209 On Literature (Staël), 4, 555 Voltaire on, 208 On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and physical differences in gender, 678–80, 708 Sciences (Hume), 30 Pignatelli, Faustina, 271 Optics (Newton), 266 Pinel, Philippe, Philosophical Nosography, 57 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Millar), 34, Pizan, Christine de, 417–21 36, 73, 78, 82, 327 Book of the City of Ladies, 417–21 Moran on, 73 playwrights, women as, 463 The Origin of the Family (Engels), 129–33 pleasure, Wollstonecraft on, 141–2 Origins of British Feminism (Rendall), 14 plebeian women, 581 Orsi, Robert, 439, 440 pluralism, 694 Ossian, 17–18, 85–6, 87, 90, 695 Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men, 174, 180 Outram, Dorinda, 707 Pocock, J.G.A., on Macaulay, 523–4 Ovid, 138 Pocock, John, 40, 413 Owenson, Sydney, 555–6 Poems (Barbauld), 477 biography, 740 poets, female, 261 The Missionary, 556 politeness, 14, 30, 40, 71, 190 The Wild Irish Girl, 556–9 definition of, 123 Woman, 556 Wollstonecraft on, 43 764 Index political rights of women, 600–2 Quakerism, 434–59 politics reform, 453, 454 and sensibility, 495–6 quietism, 444, 451 women in, 567–8, 570–86 The Politician’s Creed (Thornton), 590 ‘race’, 75, 76, 84, 88, 89–90 Polwhele, Richard, 137 and sexuality, 84–5 The Unsex’d Females, 145, 150, 551, 588 Radical Expression (Epstein), 592 and Wollstonecraft, 145 radical intellectuals, 46 polygenists, 84, 86, 87, 88 Radicals, 572 Porter, Roy, 356 Raftery, Deirdre, 225 Poulain de la Barre, Franc[,]ois, 244, 379–80 Rambaud, Honorat, 201 compared to Feijoo, 394 The Rambler (Johnson), 460 De l’excellence des hommes, 247 Ramsay, John, 16 on education, 379 ‘rational discourse’, 41 on female education, 244–5 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas feminism of, 379–80 biography, 744 On the Equality of the Sexes, 379 Histoire des deux Indies, 71, 72, 97, 98–9, power, 131 103 centralisation, 89 reading, informal, 224–5 in European history, 80 reason, 20–1, 190, 246, 357, 378, 403, 417, and love, 102 483, 546, 590–1, 659, 711 power-turned-polite principle, 40 Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke), 365 Prevóst, Manon Lescaut, 98 Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains Price, Richard, 128 (Pauw), 85 A discourse on the Love of our country, 538, Reeve, Clara, 142, 227 552 Reflections on the Revolution in France biography, 742–3 (Burke), 32 Priestley, Joseph Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week biography, 743 (Talbot), 460–1, 465–6 Essay on a course of liberal education, 500 Reform Bill 1832, 341 Principia (Newton), 266 Regnier, Francois Séraphim, 204–5, 208 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 270 Relational Autonomy, 435 private education, 225–31 religion, 22, 306, 307, 311 private property, 129 and Astell, 361 ‘proper lady’, 144 Barbauld on, 484, 484–5 prostitution, 610, 620, 698 Catholicism, 416–33 Provoking Agents, 435 Christian attitudes to women, 412 Prunay, 211–12 Christianity, 423–4 psychiatry, 57, 58 Christ’s suffering, 437 public (boarding) schools, 225–31 and Diderot, 100 public sphere, 571–80, 623, 693, 698, 700 empirical studies, 441–2 equality in, 400–4 and the Enlightenment, 410–12 Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Genlis on, 318 13 Gregory on, 24–6 Puisieux, Madeleine de, 198, 248–9 and Hays, 494–5 biography, 743–4 and infidelity, 25 Conseils à une amie, 249–50 and language, 203–4 La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme, and Macaulay, 538–50 248 and More, 319 Puritans, 464–5, 485 Quakerism, 434–59 and science, 435 Quaker women, 439, 443–50 Spain, 391 and agency, 439 women writers on, 119 ministers, 447–9 Renaissance, 351, 352, 372–5 Index 765

Rendall, Jane, 6, 263 homo-eroticism, 179–81 Origins of British Feminism, 14 influence of Calvinism on, 177 Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective (Cooper), 590 influence on de Staël, 56 Republic of Letters, 254, 259, 267, 306 influence of, 250–52 ‘republican motherhood’, 658 influence on Wollstonecraft, 31 Rèveries du promeneur solitaire (Rousseau), 58 Julie, 166, 174, 181–3, 192, 250–51, 478 Reyre, Abbé, 197 on language, 207–8, 213 Richardson, Pamela, 469 Levite of Ephraim, 181 Richesource, Jean de, 381 masochism, 179, 180 Richey, Russell, 477 and melancholy, 57–8 Ridgeway, Mary, 446 and Madame de Warens, 178 The Rights of Man (Paine), 588 Narcisse, 176 Rivet, André, debate with van Schurman, passivity, 175–9 375 Rèveries du promeneur solitaire, 58, 177, Rizzeti, Giovanni, 266 181 Rizzo, Betty, 11 sexuality, 174–88 Roach, Joseph, 649 theory of woman, 251 Robertson, William, 80 on women’s emancipation, 611 History of America, 78 Roussel, Pierre Robinson, Mary Darby, 577, 610 biography, 747 autobiography, 615 De la santé des gend de lettres, 55 biography, 745 Rowe, Elizabeth, 466–7 early life, 612, 614 Chapone on, 468 feminist writing, 618–19 Ruether, Rosemary, 438 Hubert de Sevrac, 619 Rush, Benjamin, 164, 566, 652–66, 679 Letter to the Women of England, 613, 619, biography, 747–8 620–1 and ‘republican motherhood’, 658 love affairs, 614–15 on rights, 657 on Marie Antoinette, 621–2 and Robina Millar, 660 on marriage, 622 on slavery, 658 The Natural Daughter, 578 on women, 659–60 and the Prince of Wales, 616 Russell, William, 78 stage career, 616 writing, 616–17 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 145 Robinson, Robert, 496–8 Sargent Murray, Judith, biography, 740–1 biography, 745–6 sati, 71 Roche, J.B., Entretiens sur l’orthographe ‘savages’, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 88, 98 franc[,]oise, 213–14 Diderot on, 101 Roland de la Platière, Manon, 252, 253, 262 and politeness, 123 biography, 746 Saxon attitudes to women’s political Rollin, Charles, 235, 246 inclusion, 593, 597 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 117, 126, 698 Schiller, Friedrich, 259 biography, 746–7 Schulenberg, 614, 616 Charpentier on, 57 Schurman, Anna Maria van, debate with childhood, 174, 175, 176, 179–80 Rivet, 375 Confessions, 137, 166, 169, 174, 175, 178, science 179, 180, 182 and religion, 435 Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de and women, 382–3 l’onégalité, 129 scientists, female, 265–70 Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality, 43 Scotland, 6 on education, 248, 250 Enlightenment, 13, 75–91, 326–47 Emile, 54, 137, 174, 175, 248, 250, 252 and gallantry, 34–5 family situation, 177–8 historians on women, 14, 72 flow, 183–4 stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4 766 Index

Scott, Sarah, Millenium Hall, 300 Sophie, ou l’éducation (Montbart), 251 Scott, Walter, 555 The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim (La secularisation, 444 Roche), 316 self control, 465 soul, absence of sex, 416–17, 419, 423, 427 Senaca Falls convention, 667, 676 spa towns, 651 sensibility, 137–8, 157, 252, 566–7, 698 Spain, 572 and effeminacy, 158 Enlightenment, 356, 389–409 and manhood, 161 equality, 401, 404 in medicine, 650, 654, 660–1 religion, 391 and politics, 495–6 women and the Economic Society, 402 ‘sensitive men’, 157 women writers, 392, 400, 402 sentiment, 478, 711 works on women, 390–1 sentimental culture, tears, 137–8, 156–73 Spectator, 34 Serious Proposal (Astell), 143, 313 spelling sermons, 461, 464, 479–82 books on, 21–13 Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce), 8–9 and education of girls, 197–9 Sévigne, Madame de, 198, 212 and pedagogical enlightenment, 206–10 sex education phonetic, 207 botany, 150 reform in France, 201–6 literature, 147–8 teaching of, 210–17 and Wollstonecraft, 140–55 women writers, 195–7 sexual liaisons, 249 Spence, Thomas, 598–600 sexuality, 140–1 Spensonia, 598 and ‘race’, 84–5 The Spiritual Quixote (Graves), 462 Rousseau’s, 174–88 spiritual equality, 391 Shaftesbury, Lord, on gallantry, 34 Springborg, Patricia, 362 shame, 109 stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4 Shaw, Peter, 159 stadial history, 88 Sheridan, 618 Staël, Germaine de, 4, 56–7, 252–3 Simmonds, Martha, 449 biography, 748–9 Sins of Government (Barbauld), 519 Corinne, 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62 Skedd, Susan, 230 De la Littérature, 57, 555 Sketch from the Dead (Thelwall), 159 De L’Allemagne, 118, 555 Sketches of the History of Man, Book I Delphine, 555 (Kames), 14, 78 exile, 555 slavery, 76, 630 inﬂuence of Rousseau on, 56, 252 movement for abolition, 454, 576 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de Rush on, 658 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 57, 58, 252 Smith, Adam, 40 on melancholy, 62–4 biography, 748 Starobinski, Jean, 176 on John Millar’s family, 327 Steele, Richard, 158, 159 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 161–2 The Christian Hero, 165 Smith, Hilda, 589 Steinrugge, Lieselotte, 4 sociability, 694–5 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 679 social connectedness, 436 Stillingﬂeet, Benjamin, 289 social contract, 13 Strahan, William, 8 social reform movements, 444 Strictures on Female Education (Bennett), ‘social sympathy’, 40 228–9 Society for the Suppression of Beggars, Strictures on Female Education (More), 319 339–40 The Struggle for the Breeches (Clark), 599 Socrates, 161 Strugnell, Anthony, 99, 107 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), on women in Histoire, 106, 108 158 Stuart, Gilbert, 88–9 Sonnet, Martine, 197 A View of Society in Europe, 79–80 Index 767

Stuart Mill, John, 6 Traité de la morale et de la politique studious women, 463 (Suchon), 427 Stuurman, Siep, 390, 404, 411 Traité de l’education des femmes (Miremont), The Subjection of Women (Mill), 132 247–8 Suchon, Gabrielle Traité de l’éducation des filles (Fénelon), 244 Du célibat volontaire, 427–8 travel, 104 on equality, 427 travel writing, by women, 118–19 Traité de la morale et de la politique, 427 A Treatise on Education (Williams), 232 Sur les femmes (Diderot), 71, 97, 98–107 Treatise of Human nature (Hume), 12 Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth tabula rasa doctrine, 365 (Macaulay), 519, 538, 546, 547–8 Tacitus, Germania, 87 Trenard, Louis, 199 Tahiti, 109–11 The Trinity (St Augustine), 412, 419 Talbot, Catherine, 460, 463, 464, 467–8, Triumph of Truth (LePrince de Beaumont), 471 314 Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week, The Triumphs of Temper (Hayley), 472 460–1, 465–6 truth, 137 sermons, 464 Tuke, Esther, 453, 454 Tarabotti, Arcangela Turgot, 661 Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini, Tuveson, E.L., 711 425–7 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 528 La tirannia paterna, 426 Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 177, 180 UK, women in 18th century politics, 570–86 Taylor, Barbara, 5–6, 234, 237, 478, 697 Unitarianism, 476–7, 494 Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminine universal suffrage, 587, 589, 593–4, 598, Imagination, 494 669 tears, 137–8, 156–73 male, 673, 685 of Christ, 164–5 The Unsex’d Females (Polwhele), 145 as communication, 159 USA Teich, Mikulas, 356 American Revolution, 655, 667–8 Telemachus (Fénelon), 180, 313–14 Democratic-Republican party, 667, 671–2 Thelwall, Robert Carter, Sketch from the Federal Constitution, 657 Dead, 159 medicine, 649–66 Theory of the Human Mind (Hartley), 500 nationalism, 661 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 161 Native Americans, 657–8 thinking New Jersey, equality, 668–9 dangers of, 56 political rights of women, 674–84 gender differences, 99 qualifications for voting, 672–3 traditions of, 708–9 universal suffrage, 673 Thomas, Antoine Vindication of the Rights of Women Essai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit (Wollstonecraft), 667, 669, 670 des femmes, 71, 76, 118, 124, 127 women, 656 on Madame Necker, 120–1 women’s rights, 667–91 Thompson, William, 602 Thornton, John, The Politician’s Creed, 590 Vallisneri, Antonio, 271 Thoughts on the Manners of the Great (More), van Krieken, Robert, 73 320 vascular system, 652 Thrale, Hester, 294 Vaudelin, Pére, 203 Tissot, Samuel-Auguste, 55 Vaugelas, 200 Todd, Janet, 8 Veratti, Guiseppe, 268 Tomaselli, Sylvana, 70, 71 Vergniaud, 634–5 Tone Wilson, Matilda, 329 Vesey, Elizabeth, 288, 293 Tournon, Antoine, 215 Burney on, 294 Toussaint, Les Moeurs, 315 More on, 294 768 Index

Vickery, Amanda, 519, 611 Wolfe, James, 166 The Victim of Prejudice (Hays), 577 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 3, 127–9, 552, 700–1, A View of Society in Europe (Stuart), 79–80 706 Vila, Anne, C., 3, 4 on the aristocracy, 306 Vindication of the Rights of Men biography, 750–1 (Wollstonecraft), 31 on boarding schools, 227 Vindication of the Rights of Women death, 506 (Wollstonecraft), 5, 10 education, 225 political implications, 670 Elements of Morality, 145 and the USA, 667, 669, 670 Epistles on Women, 7 Virgil, Aeneid, 180 on equality in education, 235 Virginia Gazette, 679 The Female Reader, 10 virtue, 126, 289, 384, 660 on gallantry, 44–5 and civilization, 119–25 Hays on, 46–7 and education, 226, 232 Historical and Moral View of the French and mental improvement, 463 Revolution, 31 nature of, 121 on marriage, 133 Voltaire and Mary Hays, 503 biography, 749 on patriotism, 553 on learned women, 53 on pleasure, 141–2, 152 on phonetic spelling, 208 on politeness, 43 Vues legislatives pour les femmes (Jodin), 613 on political influence of aristocratic women, 577 Waddington, Samuel Ferrand, 601, 602 Polwhele on, 145 Wade, Ira O., 246 posthumous reputation, 551–2 Wahrman, Dror, 573 on Reflections on the Revolution in France, Wailly, Nöel-Franc[,]ois, 209 32 Wakefield, Gilbert, 483 and religion, 410, 413 and Mary Hays, 498–9 reviews of, 331 Wakefield, Priscilla, Introduction to Botany, and Rousseau, 31–2 150 and sex education, 140–55 Warburton, William, 462 status, 30–1 Warens, Madame de, and Rousseau, 178 Vindication of the Rights of Men, 31, 33 Warren, Mercy Otis, 678 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 5, 10, biography, 749–50 30, 118, 119, 127–8, 137, 141–2, 144, Webster, Noah, 653 146, 148, 149, 150–1, 553, 656, 667 weeping, 137–8, 156–73 The Wrong of Woman, or Maria, 31, 140, West, Jane, 15 141, 152 Whigs, 328, 330–1 Woman (Owenson), 556 and political reform, 340–1 women views on women, 336–7 in academic institutions, Italy, 383 White, T.H., Age of Scandal, 156 in historical discourse, 76–9 The Wild Irish Girl (Owenson), 556 and labour, 131–2 Wilkes, Wetenhall, 144 and learning, 380–1 Williams, David and the natural history of man, 15–23, Lectures on Education, 232, 233 76 A Treatise on Education, 232 as philosophers, 272–7 Williams, Helen Maria, 46, 553–4 playwrights, 463 biography, 750 plebeian, 581 Williams, Thomas, Constitutional Politics, in politics, 567–8 599–600 and science, 382–3 Wilson, Kathleen, 519 teaching of Latin, 233 Wise Club, Aberdeen, 77, 89 teaching of spelling, 210–17 Wiseman, Susan, 533 as ‘thermometers’, 98 Index 769

travel writing by, 118–19 Wraxall, Nathanial, on Elizabeth Montagu, USA, 656 297–8 women intellectuals, 193 Wray, Mary, 227 women writers, 41–2, 73, 119 The Wrong of Woman, or Maria Barbauld on, 475 (Wollstonecraft), 31 and conjectural history, 117–20 Wyss, André, 201 on education, 191 Wythey, Lynne, 543 France, 259 on religion, 119 Yorkshire Association, 573 Spain, 392, 400 Young, Brian, 461 spelling, 195–6, 210–11 Young, Edward, 138 women’s role, dialogues on, 354–5 Young, Iris Marion, 216 women’s writing The Young Ladies Magazine (LePrince de and civilization, 71 Beaumont), 110, 310, 314, 315 on education, 253–4, 255 Young Misses Magazine (Le Prince de pedagogical works, 247 Beaumont), 308, 312 as a physical skill, 216 Young, William, 651 Wood, Paul, 16 Worthington, Hugh, and Mary Hays, 501 Zanotti, Francesco Maria, 266, 271, 275 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, 367 and Bentivoglio, 275–8 education, 231 Zayas, Maria de, Exemplary Novels, 391–2