Controversy and the Hostile Reader: The Appeal of George Anne Bellamy’s Apology

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the ways that controversial texts were read by reader-critics who sought to engage with their reading in new ways in the eighteenth century. It takes as its primary example An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1785), the autobiography of a woman actor in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Bellamy was praised for her sentiment but criticized for her representation of facts, despite the fact that where her descriptions can be corroborated they are generally accurate. In addition to examining published critical reactions, this essay looks in depth at the annotations of two early readers in a surviving copy of the book to document how hostile readers read works like Bellamy's Apology in order to judge, correct, or otherwise speak back to the author in a kind of dialogue. This essay suggests that women writers like Bellamy were particularly susceptible to the hostile reader because of more general distrust of women as reporters of fact, and that hostile readers were particularly interested in controversial texts that prompted engagement.