Scandalous Memoir Research Articles

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.”

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.”

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” by Caroline Breashears

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” by Caroline Breashears Neil Guthrie Caroline Breashears. Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 121. $54.99. The first half of this short book discusses two “scandalous memoirists” from our period, Frances Hawes (later Viscountess Vane) and her less well-known friend, Françoise-Thérèse de La Touche. The latter’s Apologie (1736), translated as the Appeal of Madame La T—to the Publick in 1741, anticipates in many ways the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality (1751), the more-or-less factual history of Lady Vane that is embedded in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. Ms. Breashears points out that the two women’s stories differ in significant respects from those of Teresia Constantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, the scandalous memoirists who now get the most critical airplay. Unlike them, Madame de La Touche and Lady Vane came from moneyed, if compromised, backgrounds; both were the daughters of disgraced financiers. Their narratives are framed not as apologies and were not written for money. La Touche and Vane celebrate their amorous exploits rather than seek to justify them, and they hold money in contempt. The book then turns to Lady Vane’s Memoirs in more detail, arguing that they represent an innovative collaboration with Smollett. Ms. Breashears has no new evidence for the authorship of the Memoirs, but it is difficult to question her assumption that Lady Vane provided at least the raw materials to Smollett (and perhaps a draft) because she wanted to find a “sympathetic” and noncommercial vehicle for making her case. Ms. Breashears [End Page 68] also plausibly suggests that Smollett was willing to take this on board because he wished both to corroborate his fiction by capturing real life and to adumbrate aspects of Pickle’s own story with a nonfictional narrative. Both narratives are concerned with mercantile origins, loss of status, disinheritance, the struggle of self against society, and the trials of love (including love triangles). These parallels have been pointed out in the past—as long ago as 1945, by Rufus Putney, and occasionally since—but the point has not met with universal acceptance, and therefore bears reiteration. The picaresque narrative and the female scandalous memoir are, for Ms. Breashears, not so different in their incidents and themes, although they differ in their endings. Peregrine’s story is ultimately one of restoration and reintegration, while Lady Vane is obliged to return to an oppressive husband who effectively imprisons her. For Ms. Breashears, “Such differences affirm the importance of gender in shaping lives as well as plots.” Neil Guthrie University of Toronto Copyright © 2018 W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, Kellye Corcoran, Melanie Holm, J. T. Parnell, David Venturo, and Donald R. Wehrs

Women's Life Writing in the Long 18th Century: A Critical Survey

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of developments in studies of British women's life writing in the long 18th century over the last 25 years and explores possible future directions at an exciting moment for the field. It addresses the expansion of the canon under the influence of feminist criticism and the shift in emphasis from autobiography to life writing as a hybrid and indeterminate form which works across disciplinary boundaries. It takes account of scholarly work on traditional categories of women's life writing, such as the scandalous memoir and spiritual autobiography, and considers more recent interests in biography, collective biography, afterlives and the letter. The article concludes with some reflections on potential avenues for future research, including a more rigorous approach to genre, the interrelations of manuscript and print and collaboration and collective authorship, as well as highlighting some of the challenges (and rewards) of working with life writing texts.

Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth‐Century American Women's Rights Advocates

This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth‐century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth‐century American women's rights advocates—Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—understood themselves to be in a critical, philosophical dialogue with the text of the Rights of Woman, and in some cases, the Memoirs, and defined their own, distinctive philosophies of sex equality partly within this context.

Obscenity, Censorship, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: The Case of John Cleland

I It is tempting to cast the eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland, best known during his lifetime (as now) as the author of the scandalous Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure, in the role of rebel against censorial tyranny, martyr in the ongoing struggle of freethinking and free expression against the forces of silencing and control. Cleland did, indeed, suffer kind of martyrdom after the Memoirs were publication: arrested, interrogated by the Secretary of State, threatened with prosecution, and bedeviled, even after his troubles were over, by a stigma on his name, which time has not obliterated, and which will be consigned to his memory whilst its poisonous contents are in circulation (Nichols, Obituary). (1) For more than two centuries since its publication in 1748-49, the novel has been touchstone in the history of censorship both in Britain and the United States. (2) Even if Cleland did try to avoid prosecution for obscenity by holding others responsible for the text (and for the decision to publish it), he continued, as if on dare, to produce works that pushed the limits of literary decency: an expurgated but still sex-obsessed rewriting of the original Memoirs, titled Memoirs of Fanny Hill; second novel, Memoirs of Coxcomb, masculine rewriting of the first; and translation of an Italian medical narrative of cross-dressing female adventurer who, armed with what Cleland refers to as leathern Contrivance, of cylindrical Figure, seduced and eloped with series of young women until her death when her secret was published. (3) Cleland continued to work, bravely or calculatingly (for there has always been money in the illicit), at the margins of the legally permissible. His case, however, does not so much exemplify the conflict between freedom and censorship, the literary imagination and repression, as illuminate how, during the eighteenth century, censorial regulation was inscribed into the practice of authorship itself. In this essay I explore the relationship between censorship and the self-consciously open-ended, self-critical, and self-reflexive genre (or anti-genre) of the novel that Cleland played significant part in developing. (4) Novelist and Censor might be considered antithetical figures, irreconcilable foes; indeed their antagonism has long and depressing history. But in the eighteenth century, many novelists claimed crucial censorial role for themselves, foregrounding the monitory, corrective, socially regulative aims of their work. Fanny Hill's concluding defense of virtue in Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure pushes this tendency to comic extreme, because the novel itself is such sly assault on the censorial sensibility: so smugly moralistic in its overt message, so lushly pornographic in detailed scenes. In taking on censorial persona and deliberately setting it in agonistic relation to the other personae, discourses, and voices jostling for attention in his fiction, Cleland, implicitly or explicitly, called that persona into question. But he was not the first writer to adopt such strategy. Against unstable obscenity laws, debates over the moral aims of fiction and the aesthetic approaches best suited to carrying out those aims, Cleland, Defoe and other novelists disavowed the obscenity in their own novels, became their own censors, and, thus multiplying the meanings in the text, perversely enabled them to be read in contrary ways. Strictly speaking, there was no law against obscenity in Britain before the passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857; instead, the legal control of literary expression, as Alec Craig wrote, was effected through the operation of the law of (19). Such libels might be blasphemous, seditious, defamatory, or obscene; although why an obscene publication regarded could be considered libelous posed problem for writers on the law in the eighteenth century. In the 1708 trial of James Read and Angell Carter on charges of obscene libel for publishing The Fifteen Plagues of Maidenhead, for instance, the judge held that the accused could not be found guilty: This is for printing bawdy stuff, that reflects on no person, and libel must be against some particular person or persons, or against the government. …

The Maverick Collector: The Method in the Madness of Peggy Guggenheim

The twentieth-century matron, dealer, and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim crafted both a highly public image and a personal identity through her writings, collecting, and exhibition practice. Through her outrageous social behavior, outspoken interviews with the press, and scandalous memoirs, Guggenheim presented herself as a bohemian libertine, with little or no serious intentions other than to live as brazen and unfettered a lifestyle as possible. However, by all accounts other than her own, Guggenheim was an avid learner and teacher, and her anti-intellectualism and playful irreverence belied her ultimate concern with garnering recognition as an important figure in the art world. Ultimately, Guggenheim's rejection of more conventional modes of collecting and display in favor of the role of social impresario and fashionable eccentric enabled her to produce and promote her own image as an iconic and pioneering figure in the history of patronage.

Women and Literary History: “For There She Was,” ed. by Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood

79 adopting the sensual imagery and jettisoning his warnings against sexual excess . In 1685, Dryden used ‘‘humid’’ to describe tongues in his translation of book IV, so the borrowing in Nunnery Amusements might come from there, rather than the Latin. Nunnery Amusements does not simply ‘‘target high literary culture’’ (pace Ms. Benedict); it recycles sexual discourse from earlier erotica and the classics which Dryden made current a century before. What we need now are methods for reading these texts that are sophisticated enough to account for their wild variations . Is it enough to say that Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock (v.2) is ‘‘anti-Catholic erotica’’? What does it mean for a seventeenth-century French text to be translated in eighteenth-century London? With the primary materialatour disposal, we can begin to answer such questions more fully. Joseph Pappa State University of New York, Binghamton Life Writings by British Women Writers, 1660–1815, ed. Carolyn Barros and Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Northeastern, 2000. Pp. 418. $50; $22.50 (paper). Ms. Barros and Ms. Smith argue that ‘‘life writing’’is a better term for the writing in this anthology because ‘‘autobiography ’’ is a generic category that represents only one kind. Their feminist perspective informs how they introduce the subjects of their collection as well as how they analyze the ways that women’s lives are interpreted as texts by their readers . For them, ‘‘life writing’’ expands autobiography to encompass ‘‘letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions, pleas, apologies, vindications, and scandalous memoirs.’’ The Introduction, which supports the claim that women’s ‘‘life writing’’ is different from that of men’s because of its internality and domesticity, is lengthy,redundant , and occasionally mired in references to literary theory (‘‘subvert’’ occurs three times in two pages). But the Introduction’s important historical and social background reveals the achievements of women when they were legally at the mercy of fathers, husbands, or a legal and social system biased against them. Though the collection lacks an index, there is a comprehensive Bibliography, and the editors organized entries into categories , such as family histories, conversion narratives, scandalous memoirs, defenses , and travel writing. This diversity ‘‘signals the rich mix of women’s experiences , class and occupational position, and gendered status in Britain between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.’’ For example, in addition to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ann Radcliffe , Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Robinson, there are the more obscure Jane Hoskens, George Anne Bellamy, and Hannah Robertson. Each entry includes a rich introduction to the woman’s life, family history,andthecircumstances surrounding her foray into ‘‘life writing.’’ Ms. Barros and Ms. Smith also provide bibliographical details on the text and its publishing history; each excerpt is about ten pages. This project is successful; it is inclusive, important, and well-researched . Rebecca Shapiro St. Thomas Aquinas College Women and Literary History: ‘‘For There She Was,’’ ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood. Newark: Delaware and London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Pp. 247. $48.50. The essays in this volume originate in 80 a Women and Literary History Conference that grew out of the Orlando Project, the latter dedicated to constructing the first large-scale history of British women ’swriting.Theconferenceextendedthe Project’s descriptive and recuperative mandate by considering the grounds for a newly modelled literary history, one that by implicating gender in its explorations of material and social conditions might revive a formerly moribund category —the ‘‘old’’ literary history that seemed by the early 1960s to be both elitist and inadequately theorized—and in the process correct the often naive formulations of 1970s and 1980s feminism. While the individual essays do not provide answers oftheglobalreachindicated by the claim in the collaborativelywritten Introduction that the volume discusses the ‘‘nature, effects, and the possibilities of literature,’’ they cumulatively suggest new and important directions in feminist analysis. Each of the essays concerned with seventeenth - and eighteenth-century subjects (the latter half of the collection focusses on nineteenth-century and early modernist subjects) establishes its claim to innovation by contrast with both traditional literary historical readings and with the ‘‘first-wave’’ feminist responses that questioned their assumptions. As the...

Women, writing, and the public sphere, 1700-1830

List of illustrators List of contributors Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: women, writing and representation Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O'Gallchoir and Penny Warburton Part I. Women in the Public Eye: 1. Coffee-women, The Spectator and the public sphere in the early eighteenth century Markman Ellis 2. Misses, murderesses and magdalens: women in the public eye Caroline Gonda Part II. Consuming Arts: 3. The choice of Hercules: the polite arts and 'female excellence' in eighteenth-century London Charlotte Grant 4. Representing culture: The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779) Elizabeth Eger 5. A moral purchase: femininity, commerce and abolition, 1788-1792 Kate Davies Part III. Learned Ladies: From Bluestockings to Cosmopolitan Intellectuals: 6. Bluestocking feminism Gary Kelly 7. Catharine Macaulay: history, republicanism and the public sphere Susan Wiseman 8. Gender, nation and revolution: Maria Edgeworth and Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis Cliona O Gallchoir 9. Salons, Alps and Cordilleras: Helen Maria Williams, Alex von Humboldt and the discourse of Romantic travel Nigel Leask Part IV. The Female Subject: 10. The most public sphere of all: the family Sylvana Tomaselli 11. Theorising public opinion: Elizabeth Hamilton's model of self, sympathy and society Penny Warburton 12. Intimate connections: scandalous memoirs and epistolary indiscretion Mary Jacobus Bibliography Index.

Life-writings by British women, 1660-1815: an anthology

A wide array of documents, many of which have been unavailable since their original publication, is included: memoirs of individual and family life, travel narratives, letters, appeals for funds, testimonies of spiritual conversion, and scandalous memoirs. The writers represented here range from ladies to servants, from spinsters to courtesans, from actresses to poets, from wronged wives to wives of men engaged in British colonization. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the material conditions of women's lives in Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain and critically examines the genre of autobiography. Each selection is preceded by an explanatory headnote that places the document in its historical, cultural, and social contexts.

Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography. The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing by Linda H. Peterson (review)

Reviews Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women'sAutobiography. The Poetics andPolitics of Life Writing. Victorian Literature and Culture Series. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1999. xiii + 256. In VictorianAutobiography (1986), Linda Peterson studied the way that Victorian autobiographers drew on and reacted to the tradition of spiritual autobiography, focussing on Thomas Carlyle,John Ruskin, John Henry Newman, Harriet Martineau, and Edmund Gosse. Those who are familiar with that book will not be surprised to find in Traditions of Victorian Women'sAutobiography a lucid work of literary history grounded in a remarkable depth of scholarship. Peterson begins by noting that "Victorian women did not publish the classic, hermeneutic autobiographies that flourished among their male counterparts " (ix). When, prompted by a colleague's question, she sought to discover what they wrote instead, she found a rich diversity of life writing. In Traditions of Victorian Women'sAutobiography she. provides both a history and a poetics of that body of writing. The range of texts which Peterson has surveyed is wide, because she interprets the term autobiography generously to include family memoirs, poems, and works of fiction. The book begins with a discussion of some of the generic options which were available to the female autobiographer early in the nineteenth-century, and proceeds to look in detail at Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Personal Recollections, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, Charlotte Bronte's jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's AuroraLeigh, Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, and Mary Cholmondeley's RedPottage and UnderOne Roof. Peterson acknowledges the work of feminist literary history and criticism in recovering writing by women and gaining critical attention for it, and she refers extensively to this work in the course of her argument. However, she suggests that it is time to re-examine the assumptions that women's writing constitutes a separate tradition, and that gender is a crucial feature of all literary writing: "Other possibilities —that gender may not be the crucial factor in some autobiography , that other allegiances (religious, regional, political, or social) Victorian Review99 Reviews may be equally important, that some women autobiographers may deliberately avoid a female literary tradition, or that some women's accounts may self-consciously invoke multiple traditions—these possibilities have been underexplored" (2). In several places, Peterson's analyses of the diversity and complexity of the ways that women wrote about their lives (she herself draws attention to the significance of the choice of the plural "Traditions" as the first word of her title) challenge what have become received ideas in literary studies. According to Peterson, the origins of women's autobiography are Victorian, and in her first chapter, which is a masterful demonstration of her scholarly grasp of her subject matter, she sets out three traditions which Victorian writers drew on, and in fact constructed, in their editing, criticism, and writing of autobiographical texts. The first is the tradition of spiritual autobiography, in which gender was not, at least in the seventeenth-century origin of this form in England, a significant factor. Looking at a collection of Quaker autobiographies edited as The Friend's Library in the early Victorian period, Peterson notes that they "belie the label of the Augustinian or Bunyanesque form as prototypically 'masculine'" (6). The second generic tradition is the domestic memoir, which has its origins in the family histories of aristocratic women of the early modern period. In these works gender is more prominent, and the self is seen in a more relational manner. A third category, the "scandalous memoir," originates in eighteenthcentury fiction, and it provided a precedent for Victorian women to define themselves not in terms of a pattern of spiritual conversion, or in terms of family relationships, but occupationally. In Chapter Two, Peterson contrasts the way that Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Harriet Martineau respond to these traditions in their autobiographies. Tonna writes a domestic memoir with a conversion narrative at the centre, which modifies the classic tradition of the spiritual autobiography by linking religion and home life in a way which we might consider characteristically Victorian. Martineau rejects this pattern, and ironically, given her Comtean view of Christianity, her autobiography conforms genetically to "an older, purer form of spiritual autobiography" (63). Instead of domestic life...

Look Who's Talking: Scandalous Memoirs and the Performance of Gender

Look Who's Talking: Scandalous Memoirs and the Performance of Gender