abstract: The union between England and Scotland, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, generated heated discussion both before and after the Acts of Union took effect on May 1, 1707. Members of Parliament, the nobility, clergymen, pamphleteers, and authors from both nations participated in debates on the Union, in many kinds of writing, for many years after 1707. The voices of British women, however, have not been sufficiently considered in our scholarship, and are often conspicuously absent from our accounts of these polemical wars, which were still raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in the academic conversation by taking Scottish, English, and British nationalisms as its theoretical paradigm in approaching writing by female authors. The dissertation's chapters examine how the Anglo-Scottish Union figures in the works by five women writers (Jane Austen, Cassandra Cooke, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier) publishing from 1780 to 1820. I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

This diploma thesis analyzes the genesis of the issues of the Anglo-Scottish union. In its introduction the diploma thesis shortly mentions the events from the end of English Civil War in 1651 until the death of Charles II King of England. The thesis will deal in more detail with the genesis of the Anglo-Scottish and political relations as well as historical events of England from the reign of the catholic King of England James II, his expeletion in 1688, and consequential arrival of his nephew and at the same time son-in-law William III of Orange with his wife Queen Mary II. Thereafter Queen Anne of Great Britain, who became a successor to the throne in 1702, as the second daughter of King James II, during whose reign the Union and Great Britain was established, to her death in 1714 and the arrival of the Hanoverian dynasty. The diploma thesis does not lose focus attention to causation and circumstances, which brought the English and the Scots closer together, and resulting conclusion of the Anglo-Scottish union in 1707. And last but not least it also analyzes implications of these connections for future development of Great Britain.