Published in 1998
236 pages
Eleanor Rose Ty, FRSC, is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She holds a PhD and MA in English from McMaster University, and a BA Hons from the University of Toronto.
Eleanor Ty works on Asian American and Asian Canadian literature and film, life writing, graphic novel, Canadian literature and Eighteenth Century British novels. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Canada Research Chair, 2018–2019, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was awarded University Research Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2015.
She has published twelve books: two edited collections on memory studies, six books on Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, and four on Eighteenth-Century British literature.
What is this book about?
Mary Robinson, a fantastic beauty and 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 amongst 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 attitudes – docility, maternal feeling, heightened sensibility (that key word of the period). Their focus invested these attitudes with new meaning, making supposed female weaknesses potentially active forces for social change. Eleanor Ty’s convincing argument, arrived at through close readings of ten key texts, is an important addition to the recent spate of publications which bring to the fore neglected women authors whose fascinating lives and works greatly enrich our understanding of the late eighteenth century and British Romanticism.
