Ossianic History and Bluestocking Feminism

This chapter examines the Bluestockings’ role in the development of the Scottish Enlightenment’s cross-cultural theories of human development and in the popularization of their literary equivalent, Macpherson’s Ossian poems. In addition to recovering the epistolary record of Elizabeth Montagu’s influence on major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as the popular Ossianic feasts she incorporated into her London salons, it discusses the Ossianic imitations of Catherine Talbot, Montagu’s friend and contemporary. Montagu’s Ossian-themed feasts—attended by James Macpherson, other Scottish literati, and her Bluestocking circle—enacted the equivalent social relationships and produced the refined social sentiments conjectured in Macpherson’s poems and theorized in the Scottish Enlightenment. Montagu’s correspondence documents the Bluestockings’ responses to the work of their Scottish contemporaries and their contribution to the new maps of historical development generated by the Scots at mid-century. The final portion of this chapter argues that Catherine Talbot tested this emergent historical consciousness in her Ossianic imitations, which reflect on the Seven Years War and women’s role in the civilizing process.

The Progress of Feeling: The Ossian Poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

This chapter examines the relationship between time, feeling, and gender in two foundational texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Ossian poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It contends that Macpherson and Smith created a temporal map of emotion that gauged social development from “primitive” to “developed” cultures and offered women writers and Scottish philosophers a new field upon which they could experiment with the relationship between gender and historical progress. Despite their obvious differences, Macpherson and Smith used women’s social status and the feminine values they were thought to impart to their male counterparts as tools for charting, evaluating, and questioning emerging theories of historical change. The ambiguity surrounding feminine sentiments’ placement in these Scottish Enlightenment narratives of historical progress creates the foundation for the following chapters, which trace women writers’ engagement with the theories of feeling and historical progress articulated by these two influential writers.

Poetry, Paratext, and History in Radcliffe’s Gothic

This chapter argues that attention to Ann Radcliffe’s use of Scots poetry in the epigraphs of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) transforms the female gothic into an historical instead of a psychological analytic. In the tension between Udolpho’s representations of female sensibility and its paratext—what Gerard Genette calls the “border” or “threshold” of the text—this chapter finds an uneven and non-linear feminist historiography capable of producing unconventional accounts of women’s experiences of British imperial and commercial growth. Specifically, Radcliffe uses James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748) and James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771) as signposts for her heroine’s journey, grafting Emily St. Aubert’s “progress” onto debates about history, the relationship between manners and economic structures, and the place of women in historical narrative.

Queering Progress: Anna Seward and Llangollen Vale

Drawing on evidence from the published and unpublished letters of the second-generation Bluestocking and poet Anna Seward, this chapter argues that her immersion in Enlightenment theories of aesthetic progress and her devotion to Ossianic sentiment shaped her Llangollen Vale (1796). In describing this picturesque Welsh valley and celebrating its famous occupants, from the Welsh national hero Owen of Glendower to Seward’s contemporaries and close friends the Ladies of Llangollen, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, Seward’s poem critiques established narratives of historical progress and tests the possibility that the refined feelings and sentiments produced by female friendship might flourish outside modern commercial society and the heterosexual family. Building on the work of theorists of queer history, this chapter develops the claim that Seward creates a “new time” for the ladies of Llangollen that aligns their experience of queer exile from their families and nation with accounts of Welsh resistance to English hegemony.

Introduction: A Feminine Enlightenment?

Recent scholarship on the role emotion and sympathy played in the Enlightenment’s mapping of historical progress invites a reconsideration of the women writers who are the subject of this book: Mary Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, including first- and second-generation Bluestockings and gothic and historical novelists, who are often placed outside a feminist literary tradition because of their endorsement of the feminine and refined emotions she critiques in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The mid-eighteenth-century explosion of literary, philosophical, and historical narratives that theorized what Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called “the progress of the female sex” not only made gender central to understandings of the civilizing process, but was also shaped by the work of these writers. A Feminine Enlightenment places this argument in conversation with recent work by J.G.A. Pocock and others on multiple Enlightenments, literary scholars on the Scottish Enlightenment, and feminist critics on women writers’ responses to Enlightenment.

Epilogue: Women Writers in the Age of Ossian

Women writers’ engagement with the Ossian poems and Enlightenment historiography raises important questions about feminist literary historiography, which has been wrestling with methodological questions and attempting to both develop aesthetic criteria for women’s literature and think beyond women writers’ problematic association with the domestic novel. Women writers’ engagement with Ossianic poetry provides an alternative mode for thinking about women’s literary history; by rewriting and revising Ossian’s poetry in verse and novels and adapting Scottish modes of historiography to literature, women writers shaped the social and aesthetic structures that informed the larger British Empire. In doing so, they argued for the cultural relativity of aesthetic categories and used poetry and gothic and historical novels to map and critique gender’s placement in narratives of imperial and economic development.

Stadial Fiction or the Progress of Taste

The final chapter argues that the questions about women and the civilizing process first raised in the relatively elite milieu of Montagu’s Bluestocking salons migrated into the popular fiction of the Romantic era, shaping conversations about women and historical progress into the nineteenth century. The term conjectural fiction borrows from Dugald Stewart’s term “conjectural history,” which describes the stadial method of historiography developed during the Scottish Enlightenment. Conjectural fiction highlights Regina Maria Roche and Maria Edgeworth’s use of the feminine and aesthetic categories of delicacy, elegance, and beauty to gauge changing historical and economic conditions in their fiction. This comparative approach to charting progress also migrated into aesthetic theories from the same period, including Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Lord Kames’s Essay on Criticism (1762), and Dugald Stewart’s Essay on Taste (1810).