British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820

Devoney Looser

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780801876400
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history.

Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: British Women Writers and Historical Discourse
• 2 The True and Romantic History of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson
• 3 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Historian of Her Own Time
• 4 Charlotte Lennox and the Study and Use of History
• 5 “Deep Immers’d in the Historic Mine”: Catharine Macaulay’s History in Letters
• 6 Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Infinite and Exact World History, Retrospection
• 7 Reading Jane Austen and Rewriting “Herstory”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index