Empowering the feminine

Description:

Mary Robinson, fantastic beauty, popular actress, and once lover of the Prince of Wales, received the epithet 'the English Sappho' for her lyric verse. Amelia Opie, a member of the fashionable literary society and later a Quaker, included among her friends Sydney Smith, Byron, and Scott, and reputedly refused Godwin's marriage proposal out of admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft. Jane West, who tended her household and dairy while writing prolifically to support her children, was in direct opposition to the radically feminist ideas preceding her. These authors, each from different ideological and social backgrounds, all grappled with a desire for empowerment. Writing in an atmosphere hardened towards reform in response to the French revolution's upheavals, these women focus their narratives on typically feminine attributes - docility, maternal feeling, heightened sensibility (that key word of the period). That focus invests these attributes with new meaning, making supposed female weaknesses potentially active forces for social change.

subjects: Criticism and interpretation,  Criticism, interpretation,  English Feminist fiction,  English fiction,  Femininity in literature,  Feminism and literature,  Feminism in literature,  History,  History and criticism,  Narration (Rhetoric),  Power (Social sciences) in literature,  Women and literature,  Women authors,  Women in literature,  Femininity (philosophy),  Opie, amelia alderson, 1769-1853,  Robinson, mary (darby), 1758-1800,  English fiction, women authors

People: Amelia Alderson Opie (1769-1853),  Mary Robinson (1758-1800),  West Mrs. (1758-1852)

Places: Great Britain

Times: 18th century,  19th century