Abstract
British women writers provide rich and, at times, deeply moving accounts of their visits to Revolutionary France after 1789, which complicate existing critical histories of women’s life writing. Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) arrived in Paris in 1790 and 1792 respectively as professional writers and supporters of the revolutionary cause. Royalist Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1758(?)–1823), or ‘Daily the Tall’ as she was known in the gossip columns, resided in Paris as courtesan to Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans from 1786, and Charlotte West (dates unknown) presents herself as a loyal patriot and Protestant Englishwoman living in France from 1787 to 1797. All four women reject domestic and familial roles, and in their writing explore alternative models of affiliation across and within national borders. They are highly innovative in their generic experiments, combining autobiography, travel writing, political and historical narratives, and sentimental fiction. They also share a faith in proximity and personal experience as valuable sources of authority and envisage their writing as a contribution to the politics and collective memories of the age. British women writers’ involvement in the French Revolution has been the focus of critical interest in recent years, but the Revolution’s place in a history of women’s auto/biography is in need of further theorisation.
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Notes
Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 5.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 53–4.
Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 27. Most recently, Lisa Kasmer’s work has illuminated the productive exchange between history writing and the historical novel.
Lisa Kasmer, Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830 (Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012).
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), xii.
Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 63.
Kathleen Hart, Revolution and Women’s Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 11.
Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 236–7.
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For examples of widows and widowers editing the travel writing of a spouse, see Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 144–5.
Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 134–5; Zoë Kinsley, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 12.
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Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 39.
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Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing, 8.2 (2011), 135–52 (149).
Judith Scheffler, ‘Romantic Women Writing on Imprisonment and Prison Reform’, The Wordsworth Circle, 19 (1988), 99–103 (99).
Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 47–55.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (London: Methuen, 1986), 92–119.
Gina Luria Walker, ‘Women’s Voices’, in Pamela Clemit (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 145–59 (146).
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 6.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 141.
Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192.
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), 59.
Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 6, 12.
Gary Kates, The ‘Cercle Social’, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 8–9.
David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 114.
Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 83.
The phrase is taken from Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), 170.
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660–1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989), 199.
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Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 147.
Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kevin Gilmartin, ’Counter-revolutionary Culture’, in Clemit (ed.), Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution, 129–44.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992; repr. 2005).
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). The Life Writing of British Women and the French Revolution. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_12
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