Authors:
- Offers readers a new way to understand feminist literary history at a time when ideas of female character and opinions about the appropriate role for female intellectuality were rapidly changing
- Examines Wollstonecraft’s influence on some of her contemporaries—Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen
- Argues that Wollstonecraft’s generation responded in a variety of ways to her work as a whole and to her legacy, and that they used the resources of the novel to construct a more politically moderate and pragmatic form of feminism
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PERCP)
Buy it now
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.
Table of contents (7 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
About this book
This book argues that the female philosopher, a literary figure brought into existence by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, embodied the transformations of feminist thought during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. By imagining a series of alternate lives and afterlives for the female philosopher, women authors of the early Romantic period used the resources of the novel to evaluate Wollstonecraft’s ideas and legacy. This book examines how these writers’ opinions converged on such issues as progress, education, and ungendered virtues, and how they diverged on a fundamental question connected to Wollstonecraft’s life and feminist thought: whether the enlightened, intellectual woman should live according to her own principles, or sacrifice moral autonomy in the interest of pragmatic accommodation to societal expectations.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
-
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA
Deborah Weiss
About the author
Deborah Weiss is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama, USA. She is a specialist in the long eighteenth century with research interests in the interconnections among gender, economics, education, and Enlightenment. Her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in the Novel.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives
Book Subtitle: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811
Authors: Deborah Weiss
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55363-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-55362-7Published: 28 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-85639-1Published: 30 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-55363-4Published: 17 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6516
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6524
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 291
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Feminism