'Unsex'd' texts: History, hypertext and Romantic women writers (Catharine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Sydney Owenson)

“Unsex'd” Texts: History, Hypertext and Romantic Women Writers demonstrates the complex conjunction between gender and the genre of history in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Specifically, “Unsex'd” Texts historicizes gender in the early Romantic period and establishes it as a principal characteristic of the generic (or, more accurately, extra-generic) classification of women's history-writing. The contemporary reception of Catharine Macaulay's History of England provides the context for my analysis of women writers' exclusion from historical discourse on the basis of gender: the eighteenth-century ideology of “sexual difference” dictated separate activities for men and women writers. Thus, a woman writer who participated in genres reserved for men was considered unfeminine—“unsex'd.” To create the openings they needed in order to participate in history-writing, I argue, some women Romantic writers developed strategies of generic hybridization, in which “masculine” historical writing was combined with more “appropriately feminine” discursive conventions, especially those most closely associated with the novel. I analyze Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France, Charlotte Smith's Desmond and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl to show that hybridization not only allowed women writers to participate in history-writing, but also to critique the dominant, hegemonic function of English historiography. Hybridization is the means by which women authors accessed “the sense of history”—to borrow Alan Liu's words—that is so central to British Romanticism. Finally, “Unsex'd” Texts proposes The Women of the Romantic Period Hypertext as a model for integrating the theoretical issues of gender, and genre—essentially, factors in canon formation—into classroom pedagogy.