Rethinking women/history/literature: A feminist investigation of disciplinarity in Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen

This dissertation focuses on women, history, and literature for a twofold purpose: first, to recover the ways in which these categories were understood and interrelated from the Restoration to the early nineteenth century, and, second, to rethink how they are being employed in today's feminist criticism. Turning to writings by Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen, I show that these texts confound critics who would see "history" as "male" and "women" as excluded--a view that has, until recently, permeated feminist scholarship. This is the view many assign to Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland (or to Austen herself) about history being good for nothing, full of popes and pestilences, and including no women at all--an interpretation that elides the ways "women" were conceptualized and hierarchized in relation to "history" and "literature" during this period.;Some feminists scholars unwittingly replicate the nineteenth-century relationship of "women" and "history" by embracing the problematic notion that women need only be rendered visible "on their own terms"--and ultimately, appreciated--for the discipline to proceed and for women to "progress." What these feminist theories posit only becomes possible after history and literature are instituted as discrete realms of study ("disciplines") in the mid-nineteenth century. Because this nineteenth-century paradigm seems "natural" to us today, feminist critics have repeated the interrelations of these categories--even when working with texts written before the interrelations were themselves naturalized. Feminists who have drawn on Romantic and Victorian concepts of the artist (as well as on nineteenth-century historiographical models that reinforce linearity and continuity) have prevented an investigation of changing discursive formations.;With the historicity of the disciplines in mind, the notion that "women" are subsumed by (or expelled from) an all-consuming "history" can no longer be asserted. My work on British women writers starts not with defining the woman writer in relation to "history" but with investigating the changing category "history" in relation to women's writings. This dissertation criticizes received understandings of women's Enlightenment texts and makes possible a feminist investigation of disciplinarity.