Memorializing Sorrow in Frances Burney’s “Consolatory Extracts”

After her beloved sister Susan died on 6 January 1800, Frances Burney wrote several grieving letters, but her ordinarily voluminous journals and letters were markedly scant during the year 1800. Burney expressed her grief later and elsewhere, particularly in her little-known commonplace book, “Consolatory Extracts occasioned by the tragic death of her sister Susan Phillips in January 1800,” which reveals her protracted process of mourning through her appropriation of extracts from A Series of Letters Between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the year 1741 to 1770 (1809) and its composition following her mastectomy in 1811. Many of the themes in “Consolatory Extracts” suggest that Burney’s memorializing of Susan is similarly borne out in her fictional works, particularly her unfinished tragedy Elberta (1785–1814) and her novel The Wanderer (1814).

Women writers: setting the terms of the debate

This chapter explores the idea of the bluestockings and other women writers and how they were partially enfranchised by the expansion of print culture in the 18th century. Many of the bluestockings were published writers. Indeed, Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter showed that women could succeed in areas traditionally defined as areas where men excelled. Regardless of the success of these women writers — and probably as a result of it — at the start of the 19th century, the combined social and intellectual prominence of so many intelligent women was responded to with both resentment and disgust by many men. Nevertheless, the establishment of a recognized and significant presence of women in the ‘world of letters’ paved the way for a wide range of social and political commentary from women writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and, later, Virginia Woolf.

Scientific Seduction

Beginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de Fontenelle’s and Francesco Algarotti’s scientific dialogues, translated by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti, understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible only with one’s imagination and requires that characters undergo a process of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement, qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts’ readers.

The Lady’s Poetical Magazine and the Fashioning of Women’s Literary Space

This chapter offers a detailed account of the place of women poets in the Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781–2), a periodical that ran to four volumes under the editorship of the entrepreneurial James Harrison. Octavia Cox begins by interrogating the physical space that women writers occupy in the Lady’s Poetical Magazine as well as other contemporary publications (especially George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s Poems by Eminent Ladies and Oliver Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies), as well as considering the periodical’s contribution to eminent women’s canonisation in the late-century. The chapter proceeds to detail Harrison’s own poetic contributions before turning to the many poets the magazine published and the self-circumscription these writers performed and the self-liberation they attempted. In light of the case of writers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Susan Scott (Susan Carnegie) and Elizabeth Carter, Cox concludes that Harrison’s publication constructed a vital space in which women poets contested and challenged authorial ‘female-ness’.