The
second and third panels I attended were part of a series called
"Women Outside the Blue Stocking Circle." The purpose of
these panels was to explore the lives and careers of those women
writers that were not members of the Blue Stocking Society and,
often, to discuss how and why these writers worked without the
support of this influential group. Presenting a paper titled "The
Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox," Susan K. Howard of Dusquesne
University focused on those aspects of Lennox's writing and personal
life that likely excluded her from the Blue Stocking Society.
That which most divided Lennox from members of the society was most
likely the fact that, while the latter engaged with literature as
part of their leisure time activities, Lennox wrote in order to
survive and support her family. For Lennox, writing was a business,
and one which she could simply not afford to take lightly. In her
relationships with mentors Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, for
instance, Lennox readily made demands about the publication of her
work and expressed her discontent with the market. What interested
me most about this portrait of Lennox was that she operated with what
was considered an "unfeminine directness," and the fact
that this served her in her career. Howard offered the following
illuminating characterization: "She was widely read, but nobody
liked her." In the next presentation, of a paper titled "A
Life Beyond Loveliness: What Can Be Learned from the Latter Days of
Melesina Trench," Katharine Kittredge of Ithaca College
described the unusual career of this woman writer. Well
educated in her childhood, Trench gave up intellectual pursuits in
her early adult life as a wife and mother, instead spending her time
socializing or in leisure activities. Trench later described this
period as one in which she experienced an "absence of
reflection." Interestingly, Trench became a writer in her
mid-forties, after the death of her husband. A friendship she
developed with another women writer, Mary Leadbetter, was
instrumental in her career. Afraid that attempts to have her work
published would be viewed as too aggressive, Trench sent her work to her
friend with indirect suggestions as to which newspapers would perhaps
be interested in it, and Leadbetter, wishing to support her friend,
saw to it that Trench's work was published. In her paper,
then, Kittredge offers an example of how a relationship between women
writers can "embolden" and "enable" them. The
next panelist, William McCarthy of Iowa State University, is in the
earlier stages of a project called "Was Anna Letitia Barbauld,
Because Not a Bluestocking, a No Stocking?" McCarthy asserts
that, though Barbauld is often perceived as a Blue Stocking, she
lived far from London and cannot be accurately described as having
been influenced by or influential in this group. His current work is
focused on simply surveying, therefore, what relationships could have
been of consequence in Barbauld's career: Who were the women she
knew, and to what extent? To this end, then, McCarthy lists the
women writers with whom it is documented that Barbauld corresponded
or engaged socially and describes the duration and nature of these
engagements. What he has found thus far is that each of these
relationships had been too brief or superficial to be considered of
genuine impact on Barbauld's work. He concludes that Barbauld's had
many female friendships, but none that were intellectual in nature
and that, therefore, she could have benefited from membership in the
Blue Stocking Society.
In
the second panel of the Blue Stocking series, Eve Tavor Bannet of
Oklahoma University began with a paper titled "'Wretched
Uniques': Women's Genteel Beggary in Mrs. Bennett and Her
Contemporaries." Bannet's work, in its focus on the penury
experienced by writer Anna Maria Bennett, is concerned with the
relationship between female authorship and female poverty. In her
novel The Beggar Girl,
Bennett portrays the plight of a gentlewoman newly impoverished, and
the extent to which she falls prey to both vicious men and women. At
the time, apparently, a common view of the poor was that they were deserving of their lot.
Bennett's point in this novel, then, is to demonstrate the surprising
ease with which, in the shifting economic structures of the time,
members of the gentility, and especially women, could fall into
hardship. Next, Cynthia Roman of Yale, in her presentation on print
seller Hannah Humphrey, offered the career of Humphrey as an example
of a highly successful and influential eighteenth-century
businesswoman. As the owner of a print shop specializing in
satirical prints, Humphrey operated far outside the conservative Blue
Stocking Society. As an unmarried woman, Humphrey ran her business
entirely independently, and did so with remarkable success. Her
political savvy, her understanding of cultural trends, and her sound judgment
of the graphic arts served her incredibly well. As a result,
Humphrey built a highly successful career for herself and
significantly influenced public opinion. Finally, in his paper
"'Observe Her Heedfully': Family, Friendship, and a Lady's Life
of Reading," panelist Mark Towsey of the University of Liverpool
explores what can be known about eighteenth-century Scottish women by
their reading habits and patterns and asks the following question:
"Must a woman have published in order to be considered literary
or an intellectual?" To argue against this assumption, Towsey
offers the example of Elizabeth Rose, a woman whose reading experiences are
heavily documented. Available for study, for instance, are lists of
the books she read and that were included in her personal library,
journals in which she reflected on her readings, and letters in which
she discussed and recommended books. Evident especially in this
correspondence is that eighteenth-century anxiety about women's
reading that we have discussed extensively in class. Rose criticizes
much of the literature she reads and urges her friends and family
members to avoid entirely or attend to only certain sections of
particular books. She also feels strongly, however, about the
potential of reading as a pedagogical tool. Ultimately, in this
portrait of Rose, Towsey presents women as, in their role as readers
and interpreters of literature, intellectual and cultural agents in
their own right, both as individuals and collectively.
Attending
ASECS was an extremely edifying experience. Given the panels I
attended, I of course learned a great deal about the development of
the novel as a genre and about women writers of the
eighteenth century. As this was the first national conference I have had
the opportunity to attend, I also gained much valuable information
about the nature of conferences in general. I had previously thought
that conferences served simply as opportunities for scholars to
present their finished works. I know now that many use such meetings
to test new ideas or to build on earlier ones, to gauge whether a proposed topic is worthy of
future exploration and to get feedback as to what other lines of
inquiry their own questions may engender. I especially appreciated
the fact that, among the questions asked of the panelists, there were
many "Have you read . . . ?!" and "You have to read .
. . !" It was so neat to witness the enthusiasm with which
these scholars approached their and others' work, and it made me all
the more excited to participate in such conversations in the future.
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