Between 1740 and 1770, a number of women writers choose to make explicit in their printed texts their collaboration with a ‘familiar’: a family member or close friend. In so doing, they strategically enact their personal relationships through the medium of print in order to claim for themselves a level of literary power and delineate the terms on which they entered the marketplace as authors. This thesis argues that familiar relations expressed along a horizontal axis – those of husband, wife, brother, sister and friend – offer a relatively flexible model of familiar relations in which women could acquire a level of agency in self-definition, supported by ideologies that valued women’s contribution to the polite sphere of sociable conversation. It demonstrates that Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Susannah and Margaret Minifie not only engage in collaborative literary production that is thoroughly inflected with the pressures of their historical context but that through familiar collaboration women writers display their professional authorial personae and generate social and literary criticism. Through close readings of carefully selected collaborative texts in the corpus of each writer, including the material history of the texts themselves, and the relationships expressed through those texts, this thesis highlights the complexity with which family relations interacted with print culture in the period. Far from using the familiar relation as a means of modestly retiring to the domestic sphere these women writers used their familiar relations as a basis from which to launch, describe and defend their authorial careers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:491252 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | McVitty, Debbie |
| Contributors | Ballaster, Ros |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:626a7d25-a7b8-448c-acef-cba199e63f54 |
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