Women as public moralists in Britain : from the bluestockings to Virginia Woolf / Benjamin Dabby.

• List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction. Part 1. History and the present. Anna Jameson and the use of picturesque history -- Hannah Lawrance and the claims of women's history -- Margaret Oliphant and the lessons of eighteenth-century history -- Part 2. Literature, art and life. Anna Jameson, cultural authority and public moralism -- Beautiful and useful arts in Hannah Lawrance's cultural criticism -- Marian Evans's cultural criticism in the context of women's public moralism -- Part 3. Change and continuity from the fin-de-siècle to modernity. Eliza Lynn Linton and feminism at the turn of the century -- Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and women's rights at the turn of the century -- Virginia Woolf's common reader and her social criticism -- The contexts of conclusions -- Bibliography -- Index.

• This book explores the ways in which a tradition of women moralists in Britain shaped public debates about the nation's moral health, and men's and women's responsibility to ensure it. It focuses on the role played by eight of the most significant of those women moralists whose writing on history, literature and visual art changed contemporaries' understanding of the lessons to be drawn from each field at the same time as they contested and redefined contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity. In chapters which examine the critical interventions made by Anna Jameson, Hannah Lawrance, Margaret Oliphant, Marian Evans ("George Eliot"), Eliza Lynn Linton, Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, the author recovers these writers' understanding of themselves as part of a tradition of women of letters stretching from eighteenth-century bluestockings to their own time, and the growing consensus in this period across the political range of periodicals that women's intellectual potential was equal to men's, and not determined by their sex. Overall, this book represents an important new direction in debates about modern British cultural history, and sheds new light on the bluestocking legacy, the place of women in the public sphere and the development of feminism in Britain's "long nineteenth century". 

Ämnesord

Engelska kvinnliga författare  (sao)

Engelsk litteratur  -- historia (sao)

English literature  -- Women authors -- History and criticism. (LCSH)

English literature  -- 19th century -- History and criticism. (LCSH)

Feminism and literature  -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century. (LCSH)

Women and literature  -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century. (LCSH)

Women intellectuals  -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century. (LCSH)

English literature.  (fast)

Feminism and literature.  (fast)

Women and literature.  (fast)

Women intellectuals.  (fast)

Feminism och litteratur  -- historia (sao)

Kvinnor och litteratur  -- historia (sao)

Kvinnliga intellektuella  -- historia (sao)

English literature  -- Women authors. (fast)

Women authors, English  (LCSH)

Storbritannien  (sao)

Great Britain.  (fast)

1800-talet  (sao)

1800-1899  (fast)

Genre

Criticism, interpretation, etc.  (fast)

History.  (fast)

Personnamn

Jameson, Anna, 1794-1860

Lawrance, Hannah, 1795-1875

Oliphant, Margaret, 1828-1897

Eliot, George, 1819-1880

Linton, Eliza Lynn, 1822-1898

Hastings, Beatrice, 1879-1943

West, Rebecca, 1892-1983

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941

Klassifikation

PR115 (LCC)

PN98.W64 (LCC)

809/.89287 (DDC)