Local attachments: Geography, gender and print culture in eighteenth-century English towns

This dissertation argues that place constituted a crucial condition of authorship for eighteenth-century English women writers. Part I contends that the English Urban Renaissance transformed women's roles in the eighteenth-century print marketplace by affording women new access to local markets, distribution networks, patrons and readers. Using a historicist feminist approach, Part I connects geography to gender and print culture through a series of case studies of women in English towns between the English Restoration and the French Revolution, from Quaker polemicists in late seventeenth-century York to patron and protegee Hannah More and Ann Yearsley in 1780s Bristol.;Part II and III focus solely on the resort town of Bath. The civic models for architecture, philanthropy, and social relations promulgated in Bath in the eighteenth century shared an utopian impetus which facilitated female public speech and cultural power. Examining in depth such authors as Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Mary Chandler, Esther Lewis, Jane Austen, Catharine Macaulay and Lady Anna Miller, Part II suggests that Bath's self-fashioning as a singular community allowed women to construct for themselves privileged positions as citizens, and from there, to derive civic authority as writers and arbiters of taste. This section also explores London attempts to regulate what came to be viewed as unseemly female aspiration and literary celebrity at the spa.;Part III focuses on Bath's waters. Reading the waters as metonymic in their ability to fertilize both the female body and the female imagination, the dissertation claims texts as diverse as Millenium Hall, David Simple, The Countess of Dellwyn, The History of Ophelia, "A Description of Bath," Humphrey Clinker, Lady Susan, and Persuasion as Bathonian in their representations of female sexuality, fecundity and power.;London-centered literary histories promote ideas about genre, class relations, even gender, that are specifically metropolitan. This project aims to offer a much expanded account of women's roles in forging eighteenth-century print culture, and to lay the groundwork for new studies of England's literary public sphere.