Women Writing And Revolution

The French Revolution stirred a bitter debate in Britain about the nature of civil society and the political nation. This is an original and lively study of contemporary women writers' efforts to base a reformed state and national culture on virtues and domains traditionally conceded to women. The pre-Revolutionary call for the feminization of culture acquired new and controversial meaning during the Revolution debate with the claims of Mary Wollstonecraft and others for intellectual, vocational, sexual, and even political equality with men.

But women writers of the period were faced with a literary discourse that assigned learned, sublime, and controversial genres and public and political themes to men. Women writers therefore undertook bold literary experiments which were derided and suppressed in their time, and which are still misunderstood.

Gary Kelly investigates this hitherto neglected achievement by combining a wide survey of women's writing in its historical context with detailed analyses of three leading women writers: Helen Maria Williams, Britain's most widely-read eyewitness to the Revolution; the determined feminist and self-styled 'female philosopher' Mary Hays; and Elizabeth Hamilton, relentless 'feminizer' of supposedly 'masculine' discourse, from satire to social reform, classics to theology.

This is a wide-ranging and lucid contribution to current debates concerning the intersections between women's writing, revolution, and Romanticism. Review: 'His study is informative and admirably appreciative of the work of three fascinating women.' Times Higher Education Supplement 'a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period ... in this detailed , lucid, and suggestive account of gender and cultural change, Kelly has once again provided a most valuable map for anyone engaged in trying to define the continuities - and discontinuities - in feminist histories in this period.' Vivien Jones, University of Leeds, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:4 Kelly is deeply read in this literature English Studies Vol 75 no 6 Gary Kelly's expertise on all aspects of the prose writing of the Romantic period is indubitable.

Women, Writing, and Revolution must be an essential text for both students and teachers of women's writing of this important period of English literature and cultural politics. Harriet Devine Jump, Edge Hill College, Review of English Studies, Vol. 47, No. 186, May '96