Reviews
Essential to feminist scholarship in its objective and individualized approach to these authors.
Devoney Looser's book is important. It establishes the historical consciousness at the core of the achievements of a group of notable women writers over a period of a century and a half... This book achieves its goal of bringing to our attention a series of meritorious writers and texts that exemplify the important place occupied by women in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century England.
An excellent pioneering study of women's contribution to historiography in the long eighteenth century... Looser's work opens up several potential theses and books on historiography by women by drawing attention to the sheer range of possibilities of engagement with history as a form of writing.
Taken together, Looser's seven chapters make a persuasive case for locating women's authorship in a broader field of writing than usual.
This is a highly intelligent book... Looser's arguments are stepped in the current scholarship on each of these women, and she is a generous scholar who always gives credit where it is due... she will have you thinking about [genre] as you never have before.
British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, is an original, ambitious, and exciting book. No study like it currently exists, and the subject is one that has needed to be addressed for some time. Looser covers her topic with impressive scope and detail, ably deploying biographical background, reception theory, and close readings of the works themselves to evaluate the writers.
Book Details
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: British Women Writers and Historical Discourse
Chapter 2. The True and Romantic History of Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson
Chapter 3
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: British Women Writers and Historical Discourse
Chapter 2. The True and Romantic History of Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson
Chapter 3. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Historian of Her Own Time
Chapter 4. Charlotte Lennox and the Study and Use of History
Chapter 5. "Deep Immers'd in the Historic Mine": Catharine Macaulay's History in Letters
Chapter 6. Hester Lynch Piozzi's Infinite and Exact World History, Retrospection
Chapter 7. Reading Jane Austen and Rewriting "Herstory"
Notes
Works Cited
Index