| Description |
Critical feminist discussion of eighteenth-century British women writers and their solutions to the lack of agency inherent in female experience often highlight works such as Mary Astell's feminotopia, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), that create female communities, thus emancipating women from British society and the patriarchal system so often seen as the root of all female powerlessness. Feminist scholars are interested in these female communities because of their striking liberalism in a century marked by conservative ideals of feminine behavior. This study, however, highlights the work of four women writers during the last half of the eighteenth century who develop their own solutions for greater female agency. These writers are, specifically, Elizabeth Montagu, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, and Charlotte Lennox. Instead of a separatist model, and often in reaction to such a model, these women writers imagine a model for female empowerment that fully integrates woman within British society. These models, while mitigated in the degree of change they allow, are proto-feminist in their ability to believe society needed women, and to imagine a greater scope for woman's capacity than other women. These writers build their models, I argue, using romance as a strategy to resist and critique societal norms, while also educating readers in the logic of their solutions. Their use of romance interacts with other genres, allowing each writer to model the integration she is encouraging. The generic hybridity also allows their utopian solutions to escape comparison with contemporary male utopian creations, and the interaction between romance and other genres makes romance a symbol for the kind of dreaming each writer's utopian solution will allow. |
