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