British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840

Friendship, Community, and Collaboration

A. Culley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349445578, 9781137274212
• eBook ISBN: 9781137274229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.

Part I
‘Their Lives Spoke More Than Volumes’

The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women

1

The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women

The life writing of the women preachers of early Methodism provides rare insights into friendships, communal identities, conceptions of authorship, and textual sociability within a network of women writing in both youth and age. Mary Fletcher (née Bosanquet) (1739–1815), Sarah Ryan (1724–1768), Sarah Lawrence (1756–1800), and Mary Tooth (1778–1843) (collectively referred to as the Fletcher circle)¹ played a central role in Methodism from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, maintaining close relationships with John Wesley and with one another across two generations. There is an extensive manuscript archive of their personal writings still extant, including spiritual journals and diaries, autobiographies, transcribed oral testimonies, letters, sermons, and pocketbooks. The collection is discussed in recent histories of Methodism, but its significance for studies of women’s life writing has not previously been recognised. Eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography is traditionally associated with the rise of individualism and it is understood as a genre that developed out of the Puritan conversion narrative in its emphasis on rigorous self-examination, individual religious experience, and personal testimony. However, relationships are central to these women’s self-representations, as they present family histories that are spiritual rather than biological in origin, demonstrate the interdependence of narratives of self and other, and write a shared history. Approaching spiritual autobiography as an individualist mode has worked to obscure the collaborations that often underpin these works. In the ways they wrote, edited, and published the stories of their lives and the lives of others these writers were informed by networks of conversation and correspondence and emulated the rhetorical strategies of the family memoir and commonplace book. In their interactive methods of textual production, the spiritual networks of Methodist women invite comparison with other eighteenth-century coteries, which Michelle Levy argues employ ‘modes of manuscript transmission’ and engage ‘in conversational forms of writing’.² There are also suggestive parallels with the female network of the Bluestockings, whose identities were created through ‘correspondence, patronage and conversation’.³ However, in the case of the Fletcher circle, this commitment to a collective writing practice and communal history must be understood in the context of hostility to women’s preaching and its marginalisation within official histories of the movement. Read in this light, their life writing becomes a collaboration across two generations that provides an alternative history of women’s religious experience to traditional Methodist historiography and perpetuates the legacy of early women preachers into the nineteenth century.

The life writing practices of the Fletcher circle were shaped by Methodist spiritual fellowship and its literary culture. There is a substantial body of recent work examining the significance of women’s role in early Methodism, which was initiated by Earl Kent Brown and Paul Wesley Chilcote.⁴ In addition, Chilcote’s anthologies of women Methodists’ spiritual and autobiographical writings highlight their importance within the literary culture of Methodism.⁵ Building on this work of recovery, attention is now being paid to the ways in which, in David Hempton’s terms, ‘Methodism was comprehensively shaped by women’.⁶ The recognised critical narrative is that women were crucial to establishing the Methodist movement in the mid-eighteenth century, attained a significant role that expanded throughout Wesley’s lifetime, but lost influence and freedom in the early nineteenth century as Methodism left behind its popular evangelical roots and consolidated into a denomination.⁷ This account has been complicated by Gareth Lloyd’s study of Wesleyan women preachers who continued their public ministry into the nineteenth century⁸ and Deborah Valenze and Jennifer Lloyd’s examinations of the role of women preachers in sectarian Methodist movements, such as the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians.⁹ Two important works focusing on Methodist models of community and spiritual fellowship are Bruce Hindmarsh’s The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (2005) and Phyllis Mack’s Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (2008). Hindmarsh’s research provides a welcome alternative to the traditional alignment of the autobiographical subject and the individualist self in its focus on the transnational community of the evangelical revival and the influence of collective reformation on narrative identity.¹⁰ Mack convincingly argues for a gendered approach to the study of Methodism as she suggests that men and women experienced their faith differently and stresses the importance of female relationships in Methodist spirituality.¹¹ She observes that ‘not only is female friendship one of the most neglected subjects in the history of Methodism, it is also a subject that speaks to the core values of the Wesleyan renewal movement’.¹² In a literary context, friendships are central to Methodist women’s practices as authors and editors, in their self-representations, and in the creation of a literary tradition that extends across the generations. These religious sources might therefore inform our understanding of collaboration and intertextuality within the history of women’s life writing more broadly.

Scholarship on women’s spiritual autobiography within literary studies has been dominated by discussion of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and especially the writings of early Quaker women. It has also been preoccupied with printed conversion narratives rather than more ‘diffuse’ forms of self-representation such as journals and diaries¹³ and has centred on the role of Puritan spiritual autobiography in histories of the novel.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the women of eighteenth-century Methodism have received some attention. Felicity Nussbaum comments briefly on Methodist women preachers and the rigorous self-regulation that takes place in their spiritual autobiographies.¹⁵ Vicki Tolar Burton discusses women’s public rhetoric within early Methodism in both oral and textual forms and explores the mechanisms by which they were silenced after Wesley’s death.¹⁶ In addition, Christine Krueger establishes eighteenth-century women’s preaching as a precursor to the social criticism of the female novelists of the nineteenth century and, in doing so, convincingly demonstrates ‘the crucial contribution evangelical Christianity made to the history of women’s writing’ as well as the importance of female networks and textual communities.¹⁷ The conclusions of scholars working on earlier and later periods also have relevance for the life writing of the Fletcher circle, particularly the role of communal identity and collaborative authorship within these traditions. Paula McDowell explores models of collective authorship within seventeenth-century Quakerism and argues that for these women writers identity may not have been ‘gendered, autonomous, and unique’ but rather ‘collective, social, and essentially unsexed’.¹⁸ Developing McDowell’s insight, Catie Gill’s study of community and its effect on the literary culture of Quakerism highlights the role of the family in the construction of women’s religious identities and the prevalence of collaborative memoirs and texts of ‘multiple authorship’. As Gill concludes, ‘the collaborative approach produces a sense of the extended body of believers. There is a collectivist spirit to such writing, which is established through the implicit ties between Friends writing a text.’¹⁹ This emphasis on community and life writing, fellowship and authorship, suggests interesting parallels to eighteenth-century Methodism, which are yet to be explored.

The importance of spiritual autobiography for Victorian women writers has been addressed most rigorously by Linda Peterson, who identifies spiritual autobiography, the domestic memoir, and the scandalous memoir, as the dominant traditions of women’s life writing in the nineteenth century.²⁰ Her suggestive insight that women writers were able to experiment with these established forms ‘in various combinations and permutations’ can also be applied to the earlier period of the eighteenth century when these traditions were emergent and Methodist writers frequently combined elements of the spiritual autobiography and domestic memoir.²¹ Peterson argues that the domestic memoir appears contemporaneously with the earliest women’s spiritual autobiographies and is ‘rooted not in a conception of an individual self or a religious soul but in the autobiographer as recorder of communal history’.²² The domestic memoirist’s self-conception as a preserver of the family’s values and achievements has relevance for second-generation women Methodists struggling to safeguard the history of women preachers. A potential challenge is that by subordinating articulation of the self to the demands of the community the writer loses the possibility for narrative inventiveness, self-interpretation, and narrative construction.²³ However, Muireann O’Cinneide highlights that for the domestic memoirist there is ‘a claim to life-writing authority, whereby the telling of the family tale becomes an endorsement of the author as daughter/sister/wife and as researcher, editor and writer’.²⁴ As O’Cinneide points out, we tend to associate aristocratic women with a tradition of preserving family papers and viewing them as valuable documents, but in the case of the Fletcher circle another motivation for the conservation of women’s manuscripts seems to be at work as authority is grounded in faith rather than class. The life writing of these women is also consistent with the nineteenth-century female tradition of ‘collaborative life writing’, in which life writing is conceived as a shared effort that binds the family together across the generations.²⁵ For Methodist women, this collaborative approach works to minimise feelings of separation following the death of members of their spiritual fellowship and establishes a continuous history at a time when the link between past and present was under threat from Methodism’s revisionist historiography. As a consequence, life writing is a place for women to imagine alternative relationships and preserve the collective memories of the family of Methodism.

Women Methodists and spiritual fellowship

The writing of the Fletcher circle suggests the models of community and female authority available within eighteenth-century Methodism. My understanding of spiritual belonging is informed by Benedict Anderson’s concept of the ‘imagined community’ in his discussion of the nation state. For Anderson the community is imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.²⁶ Methodism may be understood as a virtual community, transcending national borders and imagined through common practices and convictions. It emerged as part of the transatlantic evangelical revival of the 1730s and was understood by its founders, Howell Harris, George Whitefield, and John and Charles Wesley, as part of the Anglican faith. Throughout their lives, the women of the Fletcher circle remained committed to Wesley’s Arminian-Methodism, which rested on the belief that Christ died for all and therefore those who turned to God and repented would be saved.²⁷ After the death of John Wesley in 1791 Methodism moved into a separatist position and finally split from the Church of England in 1795, however, the Fletcher circle continued to identify themselves as members of the Established Church.²⁸ Hindmarsh argues that ‘the eighteenth-century experience was distinguished in part by the extensive connectedness of local revival to revival elsewhere, to a world that transcended the local milieu of parish, denomination, or sect.’²⁹ Through the repeated ceremony of prayer and hymn-singing, the text of the Bible, and a shared understanding of conversion, individual lives attained a sense of ‘parallelism’ or ‘simultaneity’.³⁰ Mary Fletcher illustrates this in her presentation of the early 1760s as a time when ‘rivers did indeed flow from heart to heart’ and her claim that ‘some drops of this river began to fall on me’.³¹

For the women of the Fletcher circle, Methodism was therefore a self-determined religious identity that provided alternative forms of connection and authority from the inherited ties of family or class. Regenia Gagnier argues that canonical autobiographical narratives are ‘typically structured upon parent-child relationships and familial development’.³² This traditional dynamic is transformed by the Methodist tendency to understand the family in spiritual rather than biological terms. In addition, they frequently reflect on the conflict between familial and religious identities and their rejections of marriage and motherhood. The movement’s status as an alternative family was part of Wesley’s vision, as Mack comments that ‘he urged his followers to consider themselves members of spiritual families […] but without the authoritarianism, possessiveness, and physicality of a biological family or extended household.’³³ This was particularly significant for women, for whom ‘the horizontal relationships of friendship or spiritual kinship were absolutely primary’.³⁴ One of the frequently rehearsed criticisms of Methodism in the mid-eighteenth century was that it ‘split families and communities’ and led women away from domestic duties.³⁵ This is partly borne out by the evidence. Gail Malmgreen’s study of Methodism in East Cheshire demonstrates that, for women, religious commitment may have ‘represented an act of independence, part of a prelude, or postlude, to marriage and family responsibilities’, while preaching or philanthropic work could become the excuse for unconventional domestic arrangements.³⁶ Wesley’s promotion of celibacy as a spiritual ideal, expressed in Thoughts on Marriage and a Single Life (1743), provided additional support for women to make alternative choices.³⁷ His reaction to the marriage of Mary and John Fletcher in A Short Account of the Life and Death of the Rev. John Fletcher (1786) suggests his preference for single sex communities rather than companionate marriage. He notes, ‘although I could in nowise condemn this marriage; yet on one account it gave me pain’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I ‘Their Lives Spoke More Than Volumes’: The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women
• Part II ‘Signed With Her Own Hand’: The Life Writing of Late Eighteenth-Century and Regency Courtesans
• Part III ‘Heard in the Sighs of General Mourning’: The Life Writing of British Women and the French Revolution
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index