SOURCE: "Making and Rethinking the Canon: General Introduction and the Case of Millenium Hall," in Modern language Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1988, p. 3.

One of the most famous literary representations of a library—one that serves as a scene of dispute over traditional literary hierarchies—occurs in Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books. In Swift's apt metaphor for the processes by which works from the past endure the changes wrought by time, the stately "treasure house of literature" is also a field of war. Recent commentators on the canon speak of the "continuous selection and reselection" that accounts for changes among the lists of the "great."¹ Swift's fable dramatizes the hostility, conflict, and sometimes personal pique that contribute to the establishment of traditions and canons. Artificial standards, as opposed to natural processes of gradual evolution, can have wide influence. Alexander Pope mockingly proposes a criterion—a minimum age of 100 years—for the canon of "classics" in Imitations of Horace, Epistle II. i. ("To Augustus"): "Who lasts a Century can have no flaw, / I hold that Wit a Classick, good in law" (35-36). Such criteria would "damn to all Eternity at once, / At ninety-nine, a Modern, and a Dunce" (59-60). The events in St. James Library in Swift's Battei evoke the possibility of a reliable standard of excellence, of time-earned consensus in which the best of the past is preserved. The Ancients dwelt on the "highest and largest" hill of Parnassus, of which they had "been time out of mind, in quiet possession." Yet they also dwell on the site of struggle, discord, and competition. Modern demands for inclusion and preeminence may suffer defeat in Swift's partisan account of the battle. But, as critics of Swift routinely point out, he was defending an already lost cause; he could only expose the aggressive energy that can topple one literary architecture and build another in its place….

A general and self-conscious re-examination of received values in the study of literature has challenged many assumptions about what we should teach and interpret. Ideas of "greatness" and "importance" survive, but the sources of these ideas—often political, economic, and subjective—have attracted analysis and sometimes refutation. "Classic," "universal," "general nature" and similar terms signify differently for post-structuralists, semioticians, deconstructionists, and feminists. Instead, other terms have become popular touchstones for critical judgment, such as "ideology" and "cultural construct." The eighteenth century cherished its own maxims of judgment: that "the two greatest gifts of mankind, … are sweetness and light," that "whatever is, is right," that art consists of "just representations of general nature" and that "the mind can only repose on the stability of truth." The confident pronouncements of Swift, Pope, and Johnson, for whom such terms were unquestioned, strike the ear with harmonies that now are unresolved….

Significant resistance to the traditional canon in eighteenth-century studies has come from the recent interaction with gender studies. We have conventionally justified the "greatness" of certain texts by attributing to them "universal human truths," but "such truths only appear so because of their congruence with the dominant ideology": "Feminist criticism questions the values implicit in the Great Works, investigating the tradition that canonized them and the interest it serves."² Rereadings of Gulliver's Travels, The Rape of the Lock, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and other maleauthored texts are gaining currency.³ Works by women are being republished, attracting critical attention, and challenging the traditional view that Jane Austen first claims a place for women in the canon.⁴

A feminist rethinking of the eighteenth-century canon, in short, partly parallels broad changes in the literary institution: "Some feminist critics are concerned with revisionary readings of the literary canon … ; others direct their attention to the recovery of neglected women writers and the establishment of an alternative canon…. These concerns correspond to the dual focus of feminist efforts in other areas—revising the traditional paradigm and restoring the female perspective."⁵ However, the official evidence of change in eighteenth-century studies is mixed. Gender is an acceptable critical issue; a dozen novels by women before 1790 (other than Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney) are available in paperback editions. Burney probably appears as often on an undergraduate reading list as Edmund Burke. But the recent Norton Anthology of Literature by Women devotes only 111 pages (out of a total of 2390) to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century (English and American) literature combined.⁶ Given the power of anthologies (especially Norton anthologies) to establish canons, the lack of representation is damaging.

Swift had found in political power and warfare appropriate metaphors for the competition for literary fame. Not surprisingly, similar metaphors accompany the struggle of women writers for inclusion in the canon. "Men oppose women's writing," wrote Margaret Cavendish in 1653, "because they think thereby, Women encroach too much upon their Prerogatives; for they hold Books as their Crowne, and the Sword their Sceptor, by which they rule, and governe."⁷ At the end of the eighteenth century, a male reviewer of Wollstonecraft's works reinforces Cavendish's earlier claim with the same telling metaphor: "Women we have often eagerly placed near the throne of literature, [but] if they sieze it, forgetful of our fondness, we can hurl them from it" (1792).⁸ Other comparisons may be drawn between the exclusion of a writer like Sade (whose subject matter was sexual power) and the exclusion of women. Here metaphors of containment of the body (imprisonment, entombment) pertain to both corpse and corpus, the dangerous body of the author and suppressed body of the dangerous text.

Critics of the eighteenth century and the canon, in this volume and elsewhere, repeatedly remark upon the sometimes deleterious effects of Romanticism upon our assessment of Augustanism or the Enlightenment. Are there consequences of a post-romantic perspective on feminist studies? How does a post-romantic bias in contemporary criticism influence or encumber our reading of women of the eighteenth century? Cora Kaplan contends that "[t]he critique of feminist humanism needs more historical explication than it has so far received." It is "rooted in that moment almost 200 years ago when modern feminism and Romantic cultural theory emerged as separate but linked responses to the transforming events of the French Revolution."⁹ Citing Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Wordsworth's Introduction to Lyrical Ballads (1800) as milestone statements of feminism and Romanticism, Kaplan argues that the two documents "stood in intimate, dynamic, and contradictory relationship to democratic politics." (150) "The implications of eighteenth-century theories of subjectivity were important" both for feminist ideas about women as writers and readers, and for more patriarchal Romantic ideas. The crucial difference is that Wordsworth could situate "all the varieties of passion and reason in creative tension." Wollstonecraft could not. No woman could author a manifesto in which sexuality and intellect could be reconciled as Wordsworthian (or Coleridgean) "emotion recollected in tranquility" or as "moral sentiments and animal sensations" balanced politically and artistically.

Feminists such as Mary Poovey and Jane Spencer have argued that the overwhelming importance of sexuality in determining the woman's fate was a phenomenon that increased as the eighteenth century "progressed." The "major revolution in poetry and taste" [Romanticism] seems also to have been accompanied by a minor revolution [feminism], a less successful one. Romantic subjectivity fixed in place critical ideals in which women could not comfortably participate. The struggle between reason and passion, intellect and irrationality, sense and sensibility, order and disorder—typical eighteenth-century themes—could merge triumphantly in a male celebration of the romantic imagination. Female creativity, in the cultural climate of Romanticism, must continually contend with the primacy of sexuality, and is disenfranchised from the alliance between moral sentiments and animal sensations. The Romantic hero (descendants of the Ancient Mariner, like Childe Harold) and the proper lady (descendants of Evelina, like Agnes Wakefield) share a twin birth historically, although they appear entirely different. How has this legacy determined our ability or inability to read pre-romantic texts authored by women?

I have chosen as an illustrative text Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall. It was published in 1762, when Tristram Shandy had been half-completed. The restraint and retirement of its predominantly female world contrasts strikingly with the exhibitionism of Sterne's predominantly male world. Probably its greatest claim to attention is that it describes a female utopia. It extensively develops an alternative fiction to the paradigmatic ones in which the heroine marries happily or dies tragically. It offers some evidence of what a woman would select as canonical for female education. Episodes in the histories of the women who populate this utopia offer, implicitly and explicitly, rethinking and remaking of male traditions. Millenium Hall went through four editions between 1762 and 1778 and then largely was forgotten.¹⁰ Conservative, morally instructive, and genteel, it maintains a controlled (one might say a repressed) tone that will disappoint a reader eager for daring radical feminism. Yet Scott obviously assumes that gender is the organizing principle of experience. Her text is comprised of contradictions, of submerged metaphors (often metaphors for women), of repeated motifs (concerning such issues as mothering, language, and sexual desire), and of resistance to fantasies usually associated with women (such as fulfillment in romantic love). I have experimented with inclusion of this book in eighteenth-century novel courses because of its contrast to the canonical list of the five male "greats": Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett.

Scott's narrative makes frequent mention of collections of books and of scenes of reading. The value placed upon them is inconsistent and highly qualified. The first interior view of Millenium Hall discovers a room with "three large bookcases," apparently laden with volumes representing all the classical liberal arts, so that the observer "could scarcely forbear believing [him]self in the Attic school" (p. 6). In this idealized scene, "sat two ladies reading, with pen, ink and paper on a table before them," "a young girl translating," and at the other end of the room, "a young girl reading aloud." But when the ladies begin to tell their histories, the relationship of the literary tradition to female prosperity grows complicated. Miss Mancel and Miss Melvyn (eventually the founders of the utopia) meet as schoolmates. Both lack parental protection. A benevolent male guardian for Miss Mancel (not surprisingly, the more beautiful of the two) appears almost from thin air. Mr. Hintman "was lavish of his money to her, and entreated her to lay it out in such manner as would be most agreeable to herself and Miss Melvyn."

Miss Mancel said she knew nothing that would be so acceptable to Miss Melvyn as books. To this Mr. Hintman replied that since that was the case, he could very easily accommodate them, for he had by him a very pretty library left him by his sister about a year before … having most of the same books in his own study.

This accordingly he sent … with proper bookcases to contain them, which they immediately put up in their apartments (p. 39).

Although the women learn "other things generally taught at schools" such as "dancing, music, and drawing," their "greatest improvement was from reading." Time reveals, however, that the source of their reading is sinister; Mr. Hintman proves "capable of no love that was not entirely sensual." Education of a woman simply makes the conquest of her more interesting. He has given access to knowledge through books as a prelude to sexual knowledge.

Similarly ambivalent is the portrayal of a minor but worthy character, Lady Brompton. She "collected a considerable library," esteemed both the "learned dead" and "living geniuses," praised the "rhyming peer," and supported the "ragged philosopher": "She aimed at making her house a little academy; all the arts and sciences were there discussed, and none dared enter who did not think themselves qualified to shine and partake of the lustre which was diffused round this assembly" (p. 144). Despite her accomplishments, she is "ridiculed under the appellation of a genius and a learned lady." "Male learning," which seems to sustain her, proves fickle. Ultimately, she condemns her own mastery of literature as vanity and neglect of religion.

The pattern of personal achievement (through mastery of the male canon), public ridicule, and self-rejection is repeated in the history of Miss Selvyn. She is "bred a philosopher from her cradle" by a father more interested in Plato and Aristotle "than in the principles of Christianity" (154). Neighbors condemn the girl and her father, who "would have done better to have bred her up to housewifery." Indeed, the "ancient moralists" encourage her to reject "the uncertainties of wedlock," even though her attractive lover admires both her looks and her mind. She retires to the country with another woman: "They were both extremely fond of reading, and in this they spend most of their time" (p. 160). The novel closes with the history of Harriet Trentham, who further varies the pattern. She and a male cousin are educated by the same tutor. Soon she is "perfect mistress of the living languages and no less acquainted with Greek and Latin. She was well instructed in the ancient and modern philosophy, and in almost every branch of learning" (p. 184). The cousins fall in love and become betrothed. The male cousin predictably meets a conventional woman in whom female sexuality predominates over every other quality; he is smitten and unfaithful to Harriet. Here the woman's self-effacement—apparently a penalty for mastering the traditional canon of learning and remaining sexually viable—takes the form of smallpox. Once the disease "had entirely destroyed [Harriet's] beauty," her "love for reading returned."

Female encounters with male traditions of learning rarely end happily. The visitors to Millenium Hall visit yet another library, this one in the home of a minister's widow: "In the room where we sat was a bookcase well stocked; my curiosity was great to see what it contained … I found they consisted of some excellent treatises of divinity, several little things published for the use of children and calculated to instil piety and knowledge … with a collection of the best periodical papers for the amusement of lighter hours" (p. 150). The selection of texts is the work of the women: the "littleness" and "lightness" of this approved collection contrasts ironically with the more dangerous heft and scope of their own educations. They have suppressed or rejected much of the past.

Scott's use of allusion gives further insight into "acceptable" texts. The women quote primarily from Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Satirical allusions ("Oft the matrimonial Cupid, / Lash'd on by time grows tir'd and stupid.") are rare. Greek and Latin never are used, despite claims of "ancient" learning by several of the female characters. The men incorporate classical allusion into their discourse much more frequently, such as the allusion to Theocritus that accompanies the first sight of Millenium Hall. The women seem aware of diverse texts, as Miss Trentham's mocking references to the Alcoran, the writings of Confucious, and books of law suggest, but they do not seem eager to use them. The older women have been educated broadly in canonical texts; not one was bred on romances. Yet, if romances have not harmed them, classical writings have not helped them. In the schools they have established, they do not perpetuate such knowledge.

Scott herself often seems obliged to say indirectly what she means and knows. She endorses fine points of propriety, in the manner of Richardson, and the female characters subscribe to such ideas as submissiveness and duty. Small breaches of honor may cause a character lifelong misery. When major points of impropriety occur, especially with regard to sex, Scott minimizes their description (not necessarily their impact) with euphemism and understatement. For example, Mrs. Morgan, who is forced to wed, endures marital rape and abuse, yet the situation is expressed as follows: Mr. Morgan "seemed to think it impossible ever to gain her love, and therefore spared himself all fruitless endeavors. He was indeed fond of her person; he admired her beauty, but despised her understanding…. [S]he suffered less uneasiness from his ill-humour, brutal though it was, than from his nauseous fondness" (p. 85). Mrs. Morgan, we are told in passing, never has mentioned her husband's name since his death. Anxious to affirm piety in women and legitimacy for herself as author, Scott urges religious study and conventional female virtue whenever the relationship of women to dangerous cultural texts becomes complex.

She frames the narrative in the voice of a male narrator, and in other ways seems to subscribe to male authority over language. The women's "modesty … has induced them to conceal their virtues in retirement." The real identity of their society never is named. Rather, the male narrator discovers "a place which I shall nominate Millenium Hall" (p. 1). Jane Spenser argues that the narrative is addressed to men, that it hopes to educate them about female values. The narrator, an aging businessman, has returned from Jamaica rich, but impoverished physically and mentally. His companion is a young fop, headed down the same path of disillusioned materialism. They stumble upon (and name) Millenium Hall. Problematic male enterprise (economic exploitation, abuse of education, spiritual neglect, egoistic materialism, public reputation) is contrasted with and chastened by female enterprise. One may argue with equal conviction, however, that Scott's narrative also addresses the concerns of the female reader.

Numerous metaphors for women give the narrative figurative significance that exceeds the lessons learned by the two male visitors to Millenium Hall. These metaphors often are subtle and extended. The women do not speak in highly figurative language. A reader might fairly complain that characterization (at least as the women are quoted by the narrator) suffers from the uniformity of the women's speech habits. Metaphorical play results from the interaction of described details of the utopia with details of the past histories of the women. The "garden" is one such detail. A garden with a house in the center is a common figure for female sexuality. (The description of Mrs. Sinclair's house and grounds in [Samuel Richardson's] Clarissa is one well-known example.) Millenium Hall is set within extensively landscaped grounds. It is described by the narrator who is "charmed" by its beauty:

The thick shade they afforded us, the fragrance wafted from the woodbines with which they were encircled, was so delightful, and the beauty of the grounds so very attractive, that we strolled on, desirous of approaching the house to which this avenue led…. [T]he eye is so charmed with the remarkable verdure and neatness of the fields, with the beauty of the flowers which … seem to mix with the quickset hedges that time steals insensibly away. (p. 4)

The narrator quickly begins to fantasize about and idealize the garden. He speaks of its seductive power and heightening enticements. It becomes the object of his desiring gaze: "the nearer we came to the house, the greater we found the profusion of flowers." It becomes, in contrast to a real and particular garden, the occasion for literary allusion and for impossible dreams of perfection. He finds the scene "truly pastoral," imagining himself "in the days of Theocritus." The garden is, for him, a place to indulge dreams of innocence and peace: "such flowers as might have tempted the inhabitants of these pastures to crop them, were defended with roses and sweetbriars, whose thorns preserved them from all attacks." He is relieved that he sees no realistic "marks of poverty and boorish rusticity, which would have spoilt the pastoral air of the scene." Using a mode of discourse never shared by the women in describing their own habitation, he soon speaks of "this fairyland" and of "this earthly paradise" in which must dwell "the Primum Mobile of all."

During his stay at Millenium Hall, the women try to show him another view of the garden. They explain that the landscaping was the project of amateurs, that "the commonest labourers in the country" had done the work. Continuing a walk through what the narrator calls "this lovely scene, where I think I could have passed my life with pleasure," the women bring them to an enclosure of hedges. Miss Mancel explains that it is "an asylum for those poor creatures who are rendered miserable from some natural deficiency or redundancy." Within the beauty of the garden are examples of nature's deformities and freakish cruelty: dwarfs, hunchbacks, and giants. Finally, there are fields, mathematically divided, where farming may take place. The narrator focuses on the "perfume" in the air and on the "gentle murmurs [that] soothed the mind into composure." But to the women, the garden is not idealized: ordinary people produced it, not a Primum Mobile. It has been and is sometimes the scene of rough labour and discord, not of a pastoral idyll. As part of nature, it includes the ugly and freakish; unhappy dwarfs live there, not fairies. In order to continue, it must be part of the practical cycles of time, producing crops and making money; it is not a timeless paradise.

There is a strong wish on the part of the two male visitors to experience and believe in a world of complete (female) innocence. The implied irony is that one of the men has been raping the natural resources of a Caribbean island, while the other has frequented amusement parks and pleasure gardens where exotic creatures are caged and displayed. Reality would spoil for them the fantasy of ideal and innocent nature at Millenium Hall. They speak allusively, comparing the garden to literary precedents for their ideal: it is Milton's Eden before the fall (p. 17); it is Sydney's Arcadia (p. 179); it is Theocritus' pastoral meadows (p. 4). One feels here an implied parallel to the unrealistic ideals of female beauty and innocence that have caused women so much pain before forming their Utopian society. They are not utterly innocent; they have knowledge and experience. The male narrator reacts characteristically to a group of young girls singing: "The sight of so many little innocents joining in the most sublime harmony made me almost think myself already amongst the heavenly choir, and it was a great mortification to me to be brought back to this sensual world by so gross an attraction as a call to supper …" (p. 11). The women are not given to such fantasies; they know the little angels are really hungry children. Variations on the ideas of nurture, beauty, cultivation, fertility, innocence—all suggested by the garden—recur through the women's histories.

Scott begins the narrative with a garden, she ends it with a contrasting description of a house. The women have acquired a dilapidated building which they will renovate. The house had belonged to a miser. Inside it, he had locked up a chest full of money and then himself. Money supplants all other passions in his life until "[t]hey found the old man dead on a great chest which contained his money, as if he had been desirous to take possession even in death." In a sense, the episode illustrates a Popean "use of riches." The miser meets a suitably moral end, while the women use material wealth for the greater good. But the bolted house and locked chest also belong to the metaphoric suggestiveness of the narrative. Images of bondage (as opposed to the relative freedom of life within the larger bounds of Millenium Hall's grounds) are numerous. Ultimately, they all relate to the status of the women themselves. First, there are episodes of locking up women by fathers and husbands. Mrs. Morgan is confined to her sick husband's chamber for three months: "in the night, as in the day, she could never quite undress herself the whole time." Marriage proves bondage in other ways, often intellectually and emotionally. Thus the women react strongly to all forms of tyranny. Miss Mancel objects to taming exotic beasts: "But to see a man, from a vain desire … reduce a fine and noble creature to misery, and confine him within narrow inclosures whose happiness consisted of unbounded liberty, shocks my nature" (p. 18). The sight of a tiger caressing its keeper has no appeal because of "the cruel means by which [it] is taught all the servility of a fawning spaniel." The freaks who live within the garden have their more benign "inclosure," willingly traded for the cages of the raree show. After learning their guest's former occupation, the women object to the institution of slavery; they are sensitive to and adamantly against any form of human flesh for money.

Finally, the women are caught metaphorically in texts that others write for them. Their powers of self-authoring are limited. The female body is the desired corpus for most of society. A metaphor of female beauty as rhetoric aptly captures this problem. After frankly informing an unwanted lover of her indifference to him and of her aversion to marriage, one of the women is told that "he admired her eloquence prodigiously, but that there was more rhetoric in her beauty than any composition of words could contain; which pleading in direct contradiction to all she had said, she must excuse him, if he was influenced by the more powerful oratory of her charms …" (p. 76).

Female eloquence in language meets frustration when contradicted by male response to "the more powerful oratory of [physical] charms." Millenium Hall is distinguished by a tension between the use of classical and canonical reading by the men and by the women. The men read reality into literary paradigms drawn from great writers of the past. Details of the estate may be understood as images from Paradise Lost; people may be understood as nymphs, swains, and angels. The women are less likely to effect these correlations between what they have read and what their lives are like.

I have tried, in this discussion, to suggest that Millenium Hall may claim a place on reading lists of eighteenth-century novels because it challenges our ways of reading and our expectations about women writers. Most important, Millenium Hall offers a different perspective on the question of the canon. Despite formulaic qualities of the women's past histories—seventeen-year-old heroines in distress, deathbed confessions, mother-daughter reunions, secrets of birth, cruel stepparents—the Utopian society of the (fictional) present resists fixed standards of excellence. The women (rarely allusive) recall the tyranny of Procrustes whose rigid notion of the universal human norm allowed him to fit "the body of every stranger to a bed which he kept as the necessary standard, cutting off the legs of those whose height exceeded the length of it and stretching on the rack such as fell short of that measure, till they had attained the requisite proportion" (p. 20). In some way, "[i]s not every man a Procrustes?" they ask. Scott is circumspect and indirect, yet she may unsettle our expectations about the "standard" that makes a novel worthwhile.

The "pre-Romantic" problem, then, figures variously in making the eighteenth-century canon. "Imaginative" writing, as a sanctioned critical category officially comes into being in the nineteenth century. "Women's" writing apparently does too. According to Gilbert and Gubar, "both in England and in America the nineteenth century saw … the formation, for the first time, of a powerful female literary tradition." But, by examining the assumptions about this conventional turning point of literary history, we may rethink more clearly the exclusion and inclusions of the eighteenth-century canon.

Notes

¹ An important volume representing the debate over the canon is Robert Van Hallberg, ed., Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

² Gayle Greene and Coppella Kahn, "Feminist scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman" in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1985), pp. 22-23.

³ See, for example, Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) on male-authored novels about women; Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1984) on satires on women; Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) on Swift and Pope; Susan Gubar, "The Female Monster in Augustan Satire," Signs 3, no. 2 (Winter 1977), pp. 380-394; Jane Spenser, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); also see the recent collection by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, eds., The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987) which includes some feminist rereadings of eighteenth-century texts.

⁴ Recently available (in affordable paperback) texts by women include Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote; Eliza Haywood's History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless; Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall; Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story; Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary: A Fiction and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's selected letters. Penguin's Virago Press and Methuen's Mothers of the Novel series officially have taken an interest in eighteenth-century works, but almost exclusively in novels.

⁵ A recent assessment of the effects of feminism on literary studies is Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppella Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). The focus of the essays in the volume is post-Romantic; no single essay is devoted entirely to the eighteenth century or earlier. Cora Kaplan discusses Mary Wollstonecraft in "Pandora's Box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism," pp. 149-161.

⁶The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, eds. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985). Beginning in mid-seventeenth century, those included are: Margaret Cavendish (3 pp.); Jane Lead (4 pp.); Katherine Philips (1 p.); Aphra Behn (6½ pp.); Lady Mary Chudleigh (1 p.); Ann Killigrew (2 pp.); Ann Finch (13 p.); Mary Astell (3½ pp.); Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu (5½ pp.); Charlotte Smith (2 pp.); Fanny Burney (4½ pp.); Phyllis Wheatley (1½pp.); Mary Wollstonecraft (21 pp.).

⁷Poems and Fancies (London, 1653); "To All Noble, and Worthy Ladies," sog. A3 r-v. See also Spencer, p. 5.

⁸Critical Review, 2nd ser. 5 (1792), p. 132. See also Spencer, p. 100.

⁹ Kaplan's article has a particular agenda not shared by the present essay. Her historical analysis of the feminist/Romantic events at the end of the eighteenth century, however, is broadly suggestive and applicable. See Greene and Kahn, pp. 146-176.

¹⁰ A recent edition, edited by Jane Spencer, appeared from Penguin Books Ltd. in 1985. Renewed interest in the text accords with current interest in the novel and in the novel as a "woman's" genre.