Women as public moralists in Britain : from the bluestockings to Virginia Woolf /
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 writin...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK ; Rochester, New York :
Boydell Press,
2017.
|
| Series: | Royal Historical Society studies in history.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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." |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xv, 288 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0861933435 9780861933433 |