Women writing the nation: Nationalism and female community in late eighteenth-century Britain

During the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a sense of British national identity emerged as Britons united in the wake of threats from their rival nation France, which conveniently became the “Other” against which Britons could define themselves. While most critics contend that national identity was the strongest bond among the British at this time, Women Writing the Nation: Nationalism and Female Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain argues that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender identity to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Women writers wanted to make it seem as if they were writing as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community. In essence, because British-French relations dominated the national imagination, women had to think about their own gender concerns in national terms as well. This leads to the two main arguments of Women Writing the Nation: first, that gender concerns during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were repeatedly voiced against the backdrop of the nation and Britain's relations with France, and, second, that British women writers during this same period created the idea of an imagined female community whose members were united not by national identity, but rather by gender identity and women's common concerns. To make these claims, Women Writing the Nation draws upon texts by many different women writers of the period, but it concentrates on the work of Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft. These three representative authors demonstrate how gender identity and national identity interact with and complicate one another, ultimately leading to a new understanding of how discussions of gender politics took place within and through national politics in the work of so many women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.