Senate or Seraglio? Swift’s ‘Triumfeminate’ and the literary coterie

Abstract

This article uses recent scholarship on literary coteries to re-examine Swift’s « Triumfeminate », the Dublin circle of women writers active between 1724 and 1734. The contradictory epithets which Swift’s friends applied to this circle, point to the complex, malleable and indeterminate spaces that characterise female literary coteries.