Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the 'Scandalous Memoir'

Caroline Breashears

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319486543
• eBook ISBN: 9783319486550
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women's life writings, particularly those labeled "scandalous memoirs." It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche's Apologie and her friend Lady Vane's Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane's collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan's Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholarsinterested in life writing, women's history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.

© The Author(s) 2016

Caroline BreashearsEighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the 'Scandalous Memoir'10.1007/978-3-319-48655-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Innovations in the “Scandalous Memoir”

Caroline Breashears¹

(1)

Department of English, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, USA

Abstract

This project contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” I argue that the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several memoirs that have received only modest critical attention: Madame de La Touche’s Apologie (1736), Lady Vane’s Memoirs of a Lady of Quality (1751), Catherine Jemmat’s Memoirs (1762), and Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs (1794). To illuminate their contributions, I review our current understanding of the origins and significance of the “scandalous memoir” as well as questions recently raised about women’s collaboration and the fluidity of forms. I add to this discussion with new information about these memoirists, whom I situate within historical and generic contexts. In so doing, I reveal their innovations in form and meaning.

Keywords

Life writings“Scandalous memoirs”GenreInnovationLady VaneMadame La ToucheTobias SmollettCatherine JemmatMargaret Coghlan

End Abstract

In Memoirs of Mrs. Coghlan (Daughter of the Late Major Moncrieffe) (1794), the courtesan Margaret Coghlan describes meeting her mother’s two sisters, who shed tears over the “mournful tale” of her life. “They accused my Husband as the Author[,] of all my Sorrows,” she notes, “and were kind enough to observe, that a Woman possessing such sensibility never could, from choice, pursue the paths of Vice.”¹ The path of vice is only one of many routes that Coghlan traces in her Memoirs. She depicts her spatial journeys across America, Britain, France, and the Atlantic Ocean; her social passage from respectability to disrepute; her intellectual journey as she comes to embrace the patriotism of America and France; and her financial spiral into debt and imprisonment.

The path of life—spatial, moral, social, financial—is a recurring theme in Coghlan’s text and eighteenth-century “scandalous memoirs” generally. Each memoirist traces her route in order to justify her choices and appeal for readers’ understanding. At the same time, each memoirist’s trail differs, creating variations in the subgenre that lead to its evolution. This book examines the paths of several innovative memoirs, tracing where they precede, intersect with, and branch from the life writings already identified as significant. It therefore adds to our generic map of the “scandalous memoir” which has emerged over the last few decades due to the work of scholars such as Felicity Nussbaum, Lynda M. Thompson, and Amy Culley.²

My focus is a cluster of memoirs that have received modest critical attention: the life writings of Madame de La Touche, Lady Vane, Catherine Jemmat, and Margaret Coghlan. Their memoirs show how the subgenre evolved partially in response to larger historical changes, including the rise of the bourgeoisie, shifting kinship priorities, and a period of political revolution. I argue that the memoirs of Madame de La Touche and especially Lady Vane contributed to the crystallization of this subgenre at mid-century (in the middle of the eighteenth century); that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett led to a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre; that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities; and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced themes and strategies that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. In this introduction, I position my project within the existing history of the “scandalous memoir.” I then suggest how this book responds to recent questions about women’s life writings, refining our history of these women’s memoirs through a precise generic approach in combination with biographical and historical contexts. I end by outlining the argument in each chapter. Ultimately, I demonstrate the innovations of these daring women, whose memoirs are at times saucy, at other times sentimental, and always compelling.

Attention to eighteenth-century women’s life writings has surged since the 1970s, when feminists such as Patricia Meyer Spacks turned a critical lens on the ways in which Laetitia Pilkington and others “imagine a self.”³ Their texts received further study in the 1980s by literary historians from Cynthia Pomerleau to Estelle Jelinek.⁴ Felicity Nussbaum’s The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (1989) was especially influential in analyzing the “scandalous memoirs” of British women such as Pilkington, Teresia Constantia Phillips, Charlotte Charke, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Snell, memoirs that she calls “sites of converging and competing discourses that display the ideologies of gendered character.” She notes, “These works revive the Greek (male) form of public self-defense in the agora, but their content is a uniquely female situation—the Fall from chastity that transformed ‘character’ and all other experience.” The memoirs function as “apologies in the classical sense of defense or justification within admission of guilt,” and “the memoirist acts as a historian who compiles and relates the facts and encourages the reader to respond sympathetically as judge and jury.”⁵ Nussbaum’s analysis provided a foundation for insightful analysis of the themes and forms of these life writings by Clare Brant, Vivien Jones, and Michael Mascuch.⁶

Lynda M. Thompson solidified the significance of these memoirs with the first monograph on the subject: The “Scandalous Memoirists”: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington, and the Shame of “Publick Fame” (2000). Thompson posits Phillips and Pilkington as the originators of the “scandalous memoir” with their respective memoirs: An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748–1749) and The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington, Wife to the Rev. Mr. Matt. Pilkington (1748–1754).⁷ These two writers “blazed a trail” and “made a significant if controversial contribution to the genre of autobiography. For, while confessing to a much-disapproved-of sexual adventuring, these memoirists also insisted on their own integrity and honour…and their right to speak out in their own defence.”⁸ Thompson helpfully situates their achievement within a period of cultural transition: “The memoirists seized the moment and took advantage of the indeterminacy of the boundaries between public and private spheres.” They used their experiences to protest “women’s unjust treatment at the hands of, firstly, husbands and lovers and, secondly and more fundamentally, the law itself.”⁹ Thompson’s monograph focuses most closely on the memoirs of Pilkington and Phillips but also briefly analyzes the life writings of others—Lady Vane and Mary Robinson, for instance—in relation to recurring issues. Thompson also compares the mid-century memoirs of Phillips and Pilkington with the cause célèbres of pre-Revolutionary France, identifying parallels between the British and French traditions, including the appeal to public opinion, envisioned as more just than the legal system. However, Thompson positions the English tradition of “scandalous memoirs” as “slightly earlier” than the French.¹⁰

Thompson’s monograph helped to shape discussions about key texts and themes within this literary tradition. Pilkington and Phillips have emerged as the founders of this tradition in mid-eighteenth century England, and their writings have received substantial analysis.¹¹ A series of essays have analyzed these and later memoirists in relation to recurring themes, such as the justification for publishing their “shame.” Thompson notes that the memoirists “confessed to ‘frailty’ not only as a marketing technique but also in order to turn their own admission into a weapon with which to attack those men who had caused their ‘Ruin’, and the society which indulged them while spurning ‘fallen’ women.”¹² Laetitia Pilkington, for instance, promises readers “a lively Picture of all my Faults, my Follies, and the Misfortunes, which have been consequential to them.” Her story, she says, will teach female readers the value of reputation: “So that I propose myself, not as an Example, but a Warning to them; that by my Fall, they may stand the more secure.”¹³

Another key theme in many memoirs is financial distress. In her Memoirs, Pilkington denies prostituting herself sexually, but she does describe her pecuniary difficulties and efforts to support herself as a writer. Pilkington “playfully sets up her memoirs, her verse and her stores of anecdotes and excerpts taken from male poets, as saleable property,” Daniel Cook observes. She is “a very willing pen for hire.”¹⁴ The publication of her narrative for profit rendered her notorious as well as famous, and Norma Clarke analyzes Pilkington’s negotiation of the social complexity when she published her first volume by subscription: “At first it had been slow because people were nervous about having their names printed as was usual in subscription publishing (and part of the appeal). Realising this, Mrs. Pilkington announced she would not print a list of subscribers.”¹⁵ By the third volume (published posthumously), Pilkington gloats over the power of her pen: “Many indeed are glad to become Purchasers. Persons whom I know nothing of, come and beg I may not put them into the Third Volume; and they will subscribe.”¹⁶ The scandal of publication was heightened in the case of Teresia Constantia Phillips, a professional courtesan who not only published for profit but also openly engaged in blackmail. Having married an “eminent Dutch Merchant” who annulled their marriage, Phillips resented the contrast between her poverty and Muilman’s wealth. Laura Rosenthal has incisively analyzed how her Apology is “mostly a story about money.” Phillips’s representation of her relationship with Tartufe provides a telling example: “Phillips offers little erotic revelation but considerable detail about who paid for dinner. The autobiography reads more like a bill of accounts than a sentimental journey: These former lovers owe her.” Most strikingly, “Phillips appears to accept her own sexual labor as a commodity; she only objects to insufficient compensation.”¹⁷ Profit also motivated many later “scandalous” memoirists to publish their life stories. Elizabeth Gooch published her Appeal to the Public (1788) while imprisoned for debt, thus pressuring her family to release funds for her support. Margaret Leeson issued her memoirs to support herself and, her editor Mary Lyons notes, “with a possible secondary agenda of shaming some of her debtors into settling their account with her.”¹⁸ Harriette Wilson continued Phillips’s blackmail tradition on an even grander scale.¹⁹

The memoirists often link the necessity for such publication with the injustice of a legal system that privileged husbands, the double standard that punished only women, and the cruelty of former “friends.” A number of memoirists were involved in legal battles: Pilkington’s husband divorced her fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Innovations in the “Scandalous Memoir”
• 2. The Business of Pleasure: The Life Writings of Lady Vane and Madame de La Touche
• 3. Novel Memoirs: The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
• 4. The Family, Sex, and Scandal: Catherine Jemmat’s Memoirs
• 5. “My Country is the World!” Margaret Coghlan’s Revolutionary Memoirs
• Backmatter