Research Catalog

Title

Empowering the feminine : the narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 / Eleanor Ty.

Author

Ty, Eleanor Rose, 1958-

Publication

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [1998], ©1998.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 224 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• Mary Robinson, fantastic beauty, popular actress, and once lover of the Prince of Wales, received the epithet 'the English Sappho' for her lyric verse. Amelia Opie, a member of the fashionable literary society and later a Quaker, included among her friends Sydney Smith, Byron, and Scott, and reputedly refused Godwin's marriage proposal out of admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft.
• Jane West, who tended her household and dairy while writing prolifically to support her children, was in direct opposition to the radically feminist ideas preceding her. These authors, each from different ideological and social backgrounds, all grappled with a desire for empowerment. Writing in an atmosphere hardened towards reform in response to the French revolution's upheavals, these women focus their narratives on typically feminine attributes - docility, maternal feeling, heightened sensibility (that key word of the period).
• That focus invests these attributes with new meaning, making supposed female weaknesses potentially active forces for social change.

Subject

• Robinson, Mary, 1758-1800 > Criticism and interpretation
• West, Jane, 1758-1852 > Criticism and interpretation
• Opie, Amelia, 1769-1853 > Criticism and interpretation
• English fiction > History and criticism
• Feminist fiction, English > History and criticism
• English fiction > 18th century > History and criticism
• English fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• Women in literature
• Feminism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Pt. I. Mary Robinson (1758-1800). 1. Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's (Re) Presentations of the Self. 2. Questioning Nature's Mould: Gender Displacement in Robinson's Walsingham. 3. Fathers as Monsters of Deceit: Robinson's Domestic Criticism in The False Friend. 4. Recasting Exquisite Sensibility: Robinson's The Natural Daughter -- Pt. II. Jane West (1758-1852). 5. Abjection and the Necessity of the Other: West's Feminine Ideals in A Gossip's Story. 6. Politicizing the Domestic: The Mother's Seduction in West's A Tale of the Times. 7. Displaying Hysterical Bodies: Philosophists in West's The Infidel Father -- Pt. III. Amelia Opie (1769-1853). 8. Re-scripting the Tale of the Fallen Woman: Opie's The Father and Daughter. 9. The Curtain between the Heart and Maternal Affection: Theory and the Mother and Daughter in Opie's Adeline Mowbray. 10. Not a Simple Moral Tale: Maternal Anxieties and Female Desire in Opie's Temper.

ISBN

0802043623

OCLC

ocm41313633

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries