LIFE LESSONS: SELF-DEFENCE AND SOCIAL DIDACTISIM IN ELIZABETH GOOCH'S LIFE-WRITING AND THE CONTRAST

Abstract

Injured wife and courtesan Elizabeth Gooch (1756–post-1804) is commonly considered a ‘‘scandalous memoirist’’ and grouped with other women whose autobiographical writing records lives lived beyond the conventional boundaries defining acceptable femininity in the eighteenth century. Despite the growing attention that her life-writing has begun to receive in recent scholarship, her later career as a novelist has continued to be overlooked, and thus the significance of fiction as a further site in which she could negotiate the relationship between personal experience and its articulation remains unexplored. This article reads Gooch's life-writing alongside her first novel, charting her search for a mode in which to communicate and give emblematic value to her exceptional life. Without a definitive legal status, she begins in An Appeal to the Public (1788) by expressing her identity within the very discourse that has excluded her in a mimetic version of the legal deposition. Then, in gaining a new context within which to define her character, having redefined herself in the public eye as a writer, her conception of self broadens in The Life of Mrs. Gooch (1792), moving beyond the immediacy of her marital breakdown to encompass her past in its entirety. Within this second text, Gooch demonstrates a nascent awareness of her personal experience as representative of collective concerns, inviting women readers to consider her life as “a matter of example”. Her first novel, The Contrast (1795), completes this process, passing on hard-learned lessons by reflecting and surpassing the author's experience to re-imagine the prescriptive plot that bound the century's fallen woman.