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Literary Criticism Women Authors

Empowering the Feminine

The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812

by (author) Eleanor Ty

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1998
Category
Women Authors, Feminist, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802043627
    Publish Date
    Dec 1998
    List Price
    $76.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442674394
    Publish Date
    Jan 1999
    List Price
    $77.00

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Description

Mary Robinson, a fantastic beauty and 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 amongst 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 attitudes - docility, maternal feeling, heightened sensibility (that key word of the period). Their focus invested these attitudes with new meaning, making supposed female weaknesses potentially active forces for social change.

Eleanor Ty's convincing argument, arrived at through close readings of ten key texts, is an important addition to the recent spate of publications which bring to the fore neglected women authors whose fascinating lives and works greatly enrich our understanding of the late eighteenth century and British Romanticism.

About the author

 

Eleanor Ty is a professor and chair of the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She is the author of The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives and co-editor with Donald Goellnicht of Asian North American Identities beyond the Hyphen.

Christl Verduyn teaches Canadian Studies and English at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. She publishes on Canadian and Qu?b?cois women’s writing, multiculturalism and minority writing, and life writing, and was the recipient in 2006 of the Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies. She is the editor of Marian Engel’s Notebooks: Ah, mon cahier, coute ... (WLU Press, 1999) and Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (WLU Press, 2005).

 

Eleanor Ty's profile page