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.

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 contemporariesMary 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

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt
Introduction: The Female Philosopher.- 1.Mansions of Despair: The Wrongs of Woman and the Commonality of Experience.- 2.Passions of the Mind: The Moral Martyrdom of Emma Courtney.- 3.More of a Philosopher: Adeline Mowbray and Every-Day Nature.- 4.Intellectual Rules: The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda.- 5. Empirical Ethics: Sense and Sensibility and Female Philosophy.- Conclusion: The Fate of the Female Philosopher: Polwhele, More, Byron, and Beyond.- Index.- <p