In 1789, Wollstonecraft included extracts from John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, one of the most popular of eighteenth-century conduct books, in her anthology The Female Reader; in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she claimed to “entirely disapprove of his celebrated Legacy,” and Gregory was among those singled out as “writers who have rendered women objects of pity.”1 On the face of it, this looks like a radical change of opinion: a clear symptom of a newly politicized Wollstonecraft explicitly rejecting the kind of advice literature which she had been prepared to reproduce, and even to emulate, as a struggling freelance writer in the late 1780s but which, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the early 1790s, she recognized as one of those repressive cultural mechanisms responsible for turning women into mere “creatures of sensation” (VRW:130). But to read this as a straightforward volt face on Wollstonecraft’s part would be far too simple an account of her view of Gregory, or of the wider tradition of female conduct literature which his text represents. Furthermore, it would be a serious misunderstanding of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with the multifarious genre of advice writing more generally. As an autodidact, and then as an independent woman trying to make a living from her writing, Wollstonecraft relied throughout her life on those instructional genres through which moral principles and enlightenment knowledges were offered up to a popular audience. Her first publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was a kind of conduct book, and Rights of Woman itself still bears a more than passing resemblance to the genre. In each case, advice on “improvement” is a primary characteristic, and the moral agenda which underpins this urge to (self-)improvement means that distinctions between attaining proper standards of personal “conduct,” defining oneself as a virtuous domestic woman, aspiring to an appropriate education, and simply expanding one’s knowledge, can become blurred: for modern readers, often uncomfortably so. What, we might ask, can the moralized literature of advice and conduct – based, as it so often is, in a belief in “natural” sexual difference and an asexual feminine ideal – have to do with Wollstonecraft’s feminism?
In this essay I want to suggest that the connections are sometimes surprisingly close. I shall try to justify this answer by defining the various strands of advice literature which most significantly inform Wollstonecraft’s ideas and writings, and by plotting her discriminating, and shifting, relationship with them. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is obviously a key text here, precisely because it is in Rights of Woman that Wollstonecraft, though writing from within the genre, most clearly modifies the conventions of advice literature, and subjects particular examples to her most explicit critique. But Wollstonecraft’s intimate relationship with advice writing can be properly understood only by first examining the two quite orthodox examples of conduct literature which she produced at the beginning of her career: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and The Female Reader.
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was the first product of Wollstonecraft’s determination to escape, as she called them in Thoughts, the more “humiliating” and “disagreeable” “modes of earning a subsistence” – as a paid companion, schoolteacher, or governess – and to earn an independent living through writing.2 The “humiliating” and “disagreeable” alternatives were all too real. Thoughts was written as the school in Newington Green which Wollstonecraft ran with her sisters began seriously to fail and just before she became governess to the Kingsboroughs in Ireland. Like many other women writers in comparable circumstances, Wollstonecraft turned in Mary (1788) to fiction; but – also like many other women – she turned in the first instance, and more substantially, to various kinds of instructional text, reliably popular and therefore potentially lucrative genres. Thoughts was followed in 1788 by Original Stories from Real Life . . . Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness and in 1789 by The Female Reader . . . for the Improvement of Young Women. Like these slightly later texts, with their disciplinary emphasis on “regulation” and “improvement,” the full title of Wollstonecraft’s first publication – Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, In the more important Duties of Life – combines education with conduct and duty. To Wollstonecraft’s contemporary audience, this title would have suggested an entirely orthodox addition to the literature of female instruction in which any improvement in girls’ education was intended to prepare them for the “important Duties” of marriage and motherhood. For modern readers, however, the title at once appears to embody a contradiction – between “education,” with its potentially liberating promise of individual intellectual development, and the restrictive and repressive implications of “conduct” and “duty.”
Since the publication of Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer in 1984, in which Poovey analyzes women’s writing as bearing the repressive scars of the cultural imperative that women become a version of the “proper lady,” conduct books have been seen as symptomatic of, indeed have been held responsible for, most of the ills of eighteenth-century bourgeois femininity. Poovey’s reading of the power of the conduct book’s domestic ideal was reinforced and sophisticated by Nancy Armstrong in her Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), where she argues that it was “[o]n the domestic front” that “the middle-class struggle for dominance was fought and won”; that “this body of writing [conduct literature] . . . helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as a middle class” and that the modest, submissive but morally and domestically competent woman it described was the first “modern individual”.3 Both Poovey and Armstrong homogenize conduct literature and, in doing so, play down not only the differences between individual texts of instruction and advice but also the constant and sometimes disruptive interaction of “conduct literature” with a growing commitment in the course of the eighteenth century to the improvement of female education. They reflect, in other words, our modern feeling that the project of conduct literature is incompatible with an ideal of self-improvement through education – and that it is even more inimical to anything that might be described as a “feminist” position.
But though modern readers might want to drive an ideological, and thus a generic, wedge between writings on female education on the one hand, and “conduct literature” on the other, the actual textual evidence makes the distinction very difficult to maintain – as more recent commentators have begun to suggest. Kathryn Sutherland, for example, explores the symptomatically mixed inheritance of Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). Chapone’s modest but rigorous educational program can be seen as part of an unbroken tradition of educated women’s writing stretching back to the beginning of the century; at the same time, however, it is directly indebted to the conduct writer Wetenhall Wilkes, who endorses a rational education for women, but only on the grounds that it should enhance their strictly domestic function to “refine the joys, and soften the cares of humanity.”4 And writers like Mary Anne Radcliffe, Priscilla Wakefield, Hannah More – and Wollstonecraft herself – were able to use “the generic scope of the conduct manual” (Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct,”40) to mount public campaigns for female education, employment and, in the case of More, patriotism. Indeed, Gary Kelly goes so far as to claim that by “defining woman as domestic yet insisting on her human dignity and her importance to both private life and the life of the nation,” female-authored conduct literature at least is “the context for Revolutionary feminism.”5
The best strategy, it would seem, is to see “conduct books,” educational writings, and in some cases proto-feminist tracts, as part of a wider tradition of advice literature dedicated to personal and social improvement, but within which the particular textual and ideological allegiances of individual examples must be carefully teased out. It is conduct books, rather than writings on education or women’s rights, which are least likely to get the benefit of this kind of reading. Alan Richardson, for example, in his excellent study of educational writing in the period, establishes careful political distinctions between examples of women’s instructional writing, but is less concerned to distinguish between two rather different conduct books: James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766), and the text with which I began, John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774).6 Yet it is only through careful definition and discrimination of particular conduct texts that we can hope to understand their precise meaning for a contemporary audience. (As we shall see, though Wollstonecraft was disapproving of both Fordyce and Gregory in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she nevertheless distinguished sharply between them.) Equally importantly, by reading in this way, we can begin to break the spell of the “proper lady” by exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions which make the ideological effects of conduct books rather less predictable.7
How, then, should we read and categorize Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: written by the woman who at the turn of the second millenium is an icon of modern feminism; but described by one critic as “a conventional conduct book, in which the arguments and topics of a hundred-year tradition of such manuals by men and women weigh heavy” (Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct,” 41)? One temptation is to read Thoughts teleologically: to tell Wollstonecraft’s story as one of ideological consistency, and look for moments of radicalism which appear to anticipate the two Vindications. An alternative strategy would be to dismiss Thoughts as a politically naive potboiler, written before Wollstonecraft’s outraged response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France “converted” her, as this particular life-narrative would see it, to radicalism. But to disentangle the “conventional” from the potentially radical in Thoughts is not so straightforward. A “hundred-year tradition” of advice literature undoubtedly informs this text (as it does A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) but, as inherited by Wollstonecraft, it is a tradition in which it’s possible to trace various contributory strands. I want to draw out three of these here: writings “on the subject of female education and manners” (VRW:91); the radical Dissenting tradition of moral and spiritual discipline; and moral satire, in which representations of women are closely associated with attacks on luxury and commercial excess. Sometimes working harmoniously, sometimes producing interesting points of tension, these are the traditions which shape Wollstonecraft’s discussion of love and marriage, of women’s opportunities and their intellectual and moral capacities, and of acceptable and unacceptable forms of feminine identity and behavior.
On several occasions throughout Thoughts, Wollstonecraft endorses the domestic priorities of current writings on girls’ education and conduct. “No employment of the mind is a sufficient excuse for neglecting domestic duties,” she asserts in her chapter on “Reading”; and discussing “Boarding-Schools” (of which she disapproves, preferring home education), she affirms: “To prepare a woman to fulfil the important duties of a wife and mother” should be the main object of her education (TED:21, 22). More problematically for modern readers, she seems in her chapter on “Matrimony” to endorse a particularly asexual version of adult womanhood: “There are a thousand nameless decencies which good sense gives rise to . . . It has ever occurred to me, that it was sufficient for a woman to receive caresses, and not bestow them” (32). At first glance, Wollstonecraft here seems to endorse a version of John Gregory’s notorious advice to his daughters “never to discover to [a man] the full extent of your love, no not although you marry him,”8 advice which she later briskly dismisses in Rights of Woman: “Voluptuous precaution, and as ineffectual as absurd” (VRW:98). And her phrasing echoes Adam’s praise of Eve in Paradise Lost: “Those thousand decencies that daily flow/From all her words and actions.”9 Writers of female advice literature often approvingly invoked Milton’s image of the submissive prelapsarian Eve. These very lines from Paradise Lost were to be quoted, for example, by the conservative Hannah More in her anti-Wollstonecraftian Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education of 1799, where More describes them as “that beautiful picture of correct and elegant propriety” – as an image, in other words, of the proper lady.10
More congenial to modern readers are those passages in which Wollstonecraft is more evidently uneasy with the current commonplaces of gender difference. At one point, for example, she lashes out against women’s lack of opportunity in terms which very obviously anticipate Rights of Woman:
Women are said to be the weaker vessel, and many are the miseries which this weakness brings on them. Men have in some respects very much the advantage. If they have a tolerable understanding, it has a chance to be cultivated. They are forced to see human nature as it is, and are not left to dwell on the pictures of their own imaginations.
(TED:32)
And the dominant tone is one of barely suppressed disappointment, of resignation to the reality of life as an inevitable but often unsuccessful struggle: against the effects of an uncultivated understanding; against the likely treachery of men towards fashionably educated, but socially inferior, women; against the limitations (“Her sphere of action is not large”) even of a comfortable marriage (26, 32). Indeed, one of the chapters is entitled “The Benefits which arise from Disappointments,” a title which sits oddly among the more standard headings of practical and moral advice on “Dress” or “Card-playing,” “Love” or “Benevolence.”
At such moments, however, Wollstonecraft deviates less than we might assume from the orthodoxies of female advice literature, whether by men or women. Indeed, this particular chapter title simply makes explicit a preoccupation which is already very much part of that tradition. In female advice texts, the suggestion that women might very often need to resign themselves to, indeed might benefit from, less than perfect circumstances goes right back to George Savile, Marquis of Halifax’s The Lady’s New Years Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter, first published in 1688 and reprinted at least twenty times during the eighteenth century. Savile regretfully but unquestioningly accepts the socioeconomic conventions of his class which will more than likely condemn his bright, beloved daughter to marriage though her “inward Consent might not entirely go along with it”: “You are . . . to make the best of what is settled by Law and Custom, and not vainly imagine, that it will be changed for your sake.”11 Sarah Pennington, in An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters (1761), writes from the assumption that women might have slightly more say in their choice of marriage partner, but she is nevertheless similarly dubious about the possibility of finding a husband who is also a friend: “so great is the hazard, so disproportioned the chances, that I could almost wish the dangerous die was never to be thrown for any of you.” And Pennington spends some considerable time itemizing the kinds of “chearful compliance” needed to cope with the many unacceptable forms of masculinity.12 With varying degrees of conviction, such texts chillingly advise women to exercise a self-discipline of uncomplaining submission to the inequalities of marriage. In doing so, however, they give voice to dissatisfactions which only a slight shift of emphasis would turn into much more explicit criticism of the gender system which condemns so many women to a life either of disappointment or, at best, to what Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman would call “a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by the favourites of absolute monarchs” (VRW:226).
In Thoughts, this potential for critique remains largely latent. Instead, Wollstonecraft emphasizes the pleasures of resignation, in terms which invoke the consolations of a private religious sensibility rather than those of worldly power or political resistance. She writes, for example, of “that calm satisfaction which resignation produces, which . . . shall sanctify the sorrows, and dignify the character of virtue” (TED:30). And her chapter on “The Benefits which Arise from Disappointments” ends with a moment of explicit sublimation:
[W]hen we look for happiness, we meet with vexations . . . And yet we were made to be happy! But our passions will not contribute much to our bliss, till they are under the dominion of reason, and till that reason is enlightened and improved. Then sighing will cease, and all tears will be wiped away by that Being, in whose presence there is fulness of joy.
(37)
Although, as I have suggested, advice to women often manifests latent anxieties about the actualities of their role as wives and mothers, its concern is nevertheless to persuade them of their overwhelming usefulness in that role. Thoughts follows the forms rather than the spirit of that project. The language in this passage is not that of female domestic virtue; rather, it recalls the essentially ungendered program of rational and spiritual improvement (reason “enlightened and improved”) associated with religious Dissent. This other advice tradition – of Dissenting sermons, moral treatises, and educational tracts – weighs as heavily in Thoughts as does that of specifically female advice literature. And when it erupts, in passages like this, we see clearly the connections between Thoughts and Wollstonecraft’s almost exactly contemporary novel, Mary: A Fiction. As in the novel, dissatisfactions are registered not as yet through any clearly formulated goal or articulate protest, but at moments in which the language of longing and aspiration hints uncertainly at the possibility of an alternative to the conduct-book world of simply “marrying, [and] giving in marriage.”13
During 1786, when Wollstonecraft was writing Thoughts, she was living and working in Newington Green, north of London, home of the prominent group of radical Unitarian Dissenters associated with Dr. Richard Price. Wollstonecraft’s title pays tribute not simply to John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), but also to Thoughts on Education (1747) by the Dissenter James Burgh, whose widow Hannah was particularly supportive of Wollstonecraft’s project. Though its detailed curriculum is designed primarily for boys, the basis of Burgh’s educative program is an explicitly non-gendered rational ideal: “it is of great consequence to the youth of both sexes, that they be early led into a just and rational way of thinking of things, and taught to be extremely cautious of judging according to outward appearances, or the superficial opinion of the multitude.”14 The only way to prepare “a young person” for this rational independence of mind is by early discipline, on broadly Lockean principles:
Previous to every other step . . . is the forming and breaking his temper; by cherishing and encouraging the good qualities of it, as Emulation, or a laudable desire of excelling, Curiosity, or thirst after knowledge, Humility, Tractableness, Meekness, Fearfulness of offending, and the rest; and by crushing and nipping in the bud the luxuriant or pernicious ones, as Anger, Pride, Resentment, Obstinacy, Sloth, Falshood, and so forth.
(Burgh, Thoughts on Education, 6–7)
Burgh’s goal is the development not just of social and moral, but also of political, awareness: “a rational set of political principles, . . . the love of liberty and their country, and consequently the hatred of Popery, Tyranny, Persecution, Venality, and whatever else is against the interest of a free people” (12).
Burgh’s Dissenting discourse typically combines spiritual meekness with rational independence of mind and a commitment to liberty. Wollstonecraft, too, advocates a “meek spirit” in her chapter on “The Temper.” The juxtaposition with Burgh reveals its more radical possibilities:
A constant attention to the management of the temper produces gentleness and humility, and is practised on all occasions, as it is not done “to be seen of men”. This meek spirit arises from good sense and resolution, and should not be confounded with indolence and timidity; weaknesses of mind, which often pass for good nature. She who submits, without conviction, to a parent or husband, will as unreasonably tyrannise over her servants; for slavish fear and tyranny go together.
(TED:23)15
Like Sarah Pennington’s worries about the difficulties her daughters might encounter in finding a decent husband, the implications of Wollstonecraft’s observations here are more radical than the advice given. The aim, after all, appears still to be submission: just submission with rather than without “conviction.” But the language of tyranny and slavery implicitly invites critique both of the husband who demands “slavish fear,” and of the abuse of class power in the tyrannic woman’s treatment of her servants.
Wollstonecraft’s allusion to Eve might also be re-read in terms of Dissenting ideals, which would emphasize the “union of mind” and soul, and not just the “sweet compliance,” in Miltonic marriage: “ . . . love/And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned/Union of mind, or in us both one soul;/Harmony to behold in wedded pair.”16 And elsewhere in Thoughts, Wollstonecraft advises women that: “Goodwill to all the human race should dwell in our bosoms, nor should love to individuals induce us to violate this first of duties” (TED:44). In all these instances, the domestic principles most closely associated with the conduct tradition are qualified by the language of spiritual aspiration, self-discipline, and equality associated with Dissent. The two are clearly far from being incompatible: domestic advice literature draws constantly on religious traditions as a way of establishing the providential nature of the gender roles it advocates. But the Dissenting tradition, clearly identifiable in Thoughts, also pulls in a more disruptive direction: both in its stress on independence of mind over “the superficial opinion of the multitude” (Burgh, Thoughts on Education, 53), and in the way in which its human, rather than gendered, regime of spiritual self-discipline works in the service of a wider, communitarian, political ideal.
Within the Dissenting tradition, the good man (and not just the good woman) “avoids all parade and ostentation; . . . He shuns all the excesses of pleasure and voluptuousness.”17 And in eighteenth-century moral discourse more generally, the opposition between superficiality and substance, ostentation and retirement, is all-pervasive. Thoughts, however, offers a conventionally gendered version of that retiring ideal. It moves from “The Nursery” in the first chapter, to “Public Places” in the last, and from the ideal mother to her dangerous alter ego, the “fine Lady”: the female embodiments of substance and superficiality who inhabit those spaces. It begins with the rational duty of mothers: to ensure, by breastfeeding and by consistent, affectionate government, that their offspring achieve the Lockean (and classical) ideal of sound minds and bodies (TED:7–8).18 It ends with warnings against the frivolous woman of fashion, sound in neither mind nor body, “still a child in understanding, and of so little use to society, that her death would scarcely be observed” (48).
Wollstonecraft’s portraits are indistinguishable from the classic conduct-book opposition between acceptable and unacceptable modes of middle-class femininity: inner virtue and “use” compared with superficial display; the “empty airy thing” who, in Savile’s formulation, “sail[s] up and down the House to no kind of purpose” compared with the woman whose “propriety of behaviour [is] the fruit of instruction, of observation, and reasoning.”19 But, like Savile’s grotesque image, Wollstonecraft’s caustic suggestion that the fine lady’s death would go unnoticed suggests another generic connection: with the dismissive, and often cruel, portraits which are a commonplace in satire. In Pope’s “Epistle to a Lady,” pleasure-seeking women are: “Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, / . . . / Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!”; and Edward Moore’s popular versified conduct-book Fables for the Female Sex, describes a
Fair, flutt’ring, fickle, busy thing,To pleasure ever on the wing,Gayly coquetting for an hour,To die, and ne’er be thought of more.20
Throughout the eighteenth century, there were close connections between female advice writing and satire, most importantly through the pervasive influence of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s moral satirical essays in The Spectator (1711–14). The Spectator encourages its readers, who importantly include women, to identify with the new bourgeois culture, in which commercial values are refined and mitigated by domestic pleasures and “polite” taste. Indeed, it makes female improvement both a sign of, and, in its stress on “well regulated Families,” a means to, social progress. The effect is mixed. Women are addressed as “reasonable [i.e. rational] creatures,” and invited to participate as readers in the virtual public sphere of “Knowledge and Virtue”; but their actual sphere of influence is implicitly limited to the domestic, the role to which “those Virtues which are the Embellishments, of the Sex” are most suited.21 The Spectator, and the periodical tradition which it initiated, urge women to greater seriousness by repeating for a new consumer society the age-old accusation that they are “smitten with every thing that is showy and superficial.”22
Wollstonecraft’s thorough familiarity with periodical satire becomes most apparent in The Female Reader, where her extracts include Spectator 15, under the title “Female Passion for Dress and Show.”23 In Thoughts, the satirical voice surfaces only occasionally: when Wollstonecraft meaningfully misquotes Pope, for example: “Most women, and men too, have no characters at all” (TED:36);24 or, as we have seen, in her pitiless dismissal of the fine lady’s uselessness. This moment of virulence anticipates what one critic has described as Wollstonecraft’s “feminist misogyny”: her fierce critique in Rights of Woman of the “false refinement” which “not only renders [women] uncomfortable themselves, but troublesome . . . to others” (VRW:130).25 And in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she would put gendered satirical commonplaces to powerful political effect. Spectator 15 rejects those women “who consider only the Drapery of the Species” rather than “those Ornaments of the Mind, that make Persons Illustrious in themselves, and Useful to others.”26 In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft scorns the “gorgeous drapery” in which Edmund Burke “enwrapped [his] tyrannic principles,” turning the familiar vocabularies of superficiality and substance against Burke’s defence of tradition which, she claims, undermines “religion and virtue to set up a spurious, sensual beauty.”27
Such radicalism was in the future, however. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters fits more or less seamlessly into the continuum of advice writing which connects periodicals with the literature of conduct, education, and spiritual improvement. The text’s manifest tensions – between resigned compliance and the possibility of alternative consolations; between spiritual meekness and rational independence; between domestic duty and the desire for participation in a wider sphere – are themselves typical of these genres. Wollstonecraft is as yet reproducing, rather than self-consciously exploiting, the central contradiction of advice traditions in which instruction on how to conform to established patterns of behavior is based in an appeal to readers’ individualistic desires for self-improvement.
Almost immediately after its publication, substantial extracts from Thoughts appeared in three consecutive issues of The Lady’s Magazine. The following year, a pirated edition was published in Dublin in a volume which included Instructions to a Governess by the influential enlightenment educationist and theologian François Fénelon, and the anonymous Address to Mothers. Two chapters, on “Obstinacy” and “Needle-work,” have been silently added to Wollstonecraft’s original text, and it comes with an authoritative recommendation quoted from The English Review:
These thoughts are employed on various important situations and incidents in the ordinary life of females, and are, in general, dictated with great judgment. Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have reflected maturely on her subject; . . . while her manner gives authority, her good sense adds irresistible weight to almost all her precepts and remarks. We would therefore recommend these Thoughts as worthy the attention of those who are more immediately concerned in the education of young ladies.28
Even without this reviewer’s approval, the acceptability of Thoughts is amply evident from the way in which it was so readily absorbed and reproduced by a publishing industry ever eager to cash in on the lucrative market for such texts. One of the most significant characteristics of advice writing as a phenomenon within print culture is the endless recycling which went on, both of selected extracts and of whole texts: as reprints, legitimate or otherwise; in compendium editions; or, most typically perhaps, in miscellanies of all kinds, whether periodicals, anthologies, or improving “readers.” In The Lady’s Magazine, for example, Wollstonecraft’s chapters on “Exterior Accomplishments,” “Dress,” “Boarding-Schools,” “Matrimony,” “The Treatment of Servants,” and “Public Places” appear as part of the usual women’s magazine farrago of serialized fiction, news digests, sentimental poetry, puzzles, historical narratives, and handy hints (in the first issue in which Wollstonecraft appeared, these are on the “Description and Culture of Bulbous Rooted Flowers”): in short, as the editors point out in introducing their unattributed selections from Wollstonecraft, of “whatever has a particular tendency to improve the female character in wisdom, virtue, and knowledge, and to assist in forming a proper estimate of exterior accomplishments” (Lady’s Magazine, 18:227). Wollstonecraft’s “proper estimate” of “Dress” is expressed in by now familiar terms: “By far too much of a girl’s time is taken up in dress . . . The body hides the mind, and it is, in its turn, obscured by the drapery” (TED:16). The Lady’s Magazine’s interpretation of “a proper estimate” is a good deal more flexible (after all, the magazine regularly includes fashion plates and the latest fabric designs), but Wollstonecraft’s singleminded preference for “a cultivated mind” over such frivolous “drapery” can nevertheless be happily accommodated within eighteenth-century women’s magazine culture’s professed commitment to “improving” the female character.29
Wollstonecraft’s own moneyspinner anthology, The Female Reader, though much less heterogeneous in content than periodicals like The Lady’s Magazine, is directed at a similar market. Such anthologies were a popular spin-off from the growing concern with female education. Consisting, as Wollstonecraft put it in her preface, of “the most useful passages of many volumes,” they offered digestible gobbets of improving literature, designed to “imprint some useful lessons on the mind” and “cultivate the taste” of a still comparatively new, and supposedly vulnerable, female audience.30 Like Thoughts, The Female Reader slotted neatly into its niche market: very soon after publication it was included in the revised list of recommended reading in a new edition of Pennington’s Advice to her Daughters, alongside Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts and several of the periodicals on which The Female Reader draws.31
But “hack-work” though it might have been, it is not necessarily contradictory also to see The Female Reader as a text which, in the words of one critic, “exposes Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas and personal characteristics more sharply than any other early work.”32 It certainly gives a good indication of her early reading – or, at least, of the books she had to hand, either in her own library, or available to her, in some cases as texts for review in the Analytical Review, in the office of her publisher Joseph Johnson. It also, importantly, indicates the generic variety which advice writing, broadly defined, might include; and it establishes a canon of texts – from Shakespeare to Sarah Pennington; Milton to Mrs. Chapone – which Wollstonecraft categorizes as by “our best authors” (FR:55) because of their usefulness within a wider instructional project.
“[P]rincipally intended for the improvement of females,” The Female Reader makes the ability to “read well” (FR:55) the basis of a gradualist program of proper refinement: in taste, feeling, reason, morality, and, ultimately, piety. “[T]he taste should very gradually be formed,” Wollstonecraft asserts; and her ordered series of readings will, she claims, “awaken the affections and fix good habits” (FR:56). The major advice traditions evident in Thoughts also shape The Female Reader. In her insistence on the cultivation of taste as a moral undertaking, Wollstonecraft works within the orthodoxies of eighteenth-century politeness, maintaining The Spectator’s programme of “constant and assiduous Culture”;33 in her concern to inculcate “good habits,” she follows enlightened Lockean educational theory, which works with feeling and curiosity to bring the passions under the discipline of reason; whilst the inclusion of devotional pieces which can “still the murmurs of discontent” (FR:56), reproduces the quietist advice of the female conduct tradition. In its mode of organization and choice of texts, as well as its belief in the “external accomplishment” of reading aloud as both the means to, and the sign of, inner virtue, The Female Reader again demonstrates an immediate allegiance to Dissenting educational literature.
Wollstonecraft’s model, as she herself makes clear, was William Enfield’s The Speaker: or, Miscellaneous Pieces, selected from the Best English Writers, and disposed under proper heads, with a view to facilitate the improvement of youth in Reading and Speaking (1774), a new edition of which was published by Joseph Johnson in 1786. The Speaker was originally produced for pupils at the Warrington Dissenting Academy, where Enfield (who was later to write a favorable review of Rights of Woman) was tutor, secretary, and Rector.34 Johnson acted as London publisher for the Warrington group, whose members included Joseph Priestley and Anna Letitia Barbauld, and the idea of producing a parallel collection for women readers very probably came from him. The Female Reader offers a more general program of “improvement” than Enfield’s Speaker. His collection was a contribution to the elocution movement, which encouraged “standard” English as the spoken dialect of the professional classes. Wollstonecraft’s title identifies reading rather than speaking out, modesty rather than performance, as the more suitable occupation for women: her collection has no equivalent of the “Orations and Harangues” or, indeed, of the “Argumentative Pieces” which Enfield includes. The Speaker has no equivalent to Wollstonecraft’s “Book VI: Devotional Pieces, and Reflections on Religious Objects,” nor does it draw on the Bible, as Wollstonecraft does throughout. Her textual choices emphasize humanitarian feeling, piety, and the familiar moral discipline of depth over surface: a recurrent preoccupation, particularly in “Book II: Didactic and Moral Pieces,” is “Dress subservient to useful Purposes” (FR:121).35
So, although it shares some sources with The Speaker (most notably Shakespeare and a wide range of periodicals), Wollstonecraft’s instructional reader encourages a distinctly feminized and moralized taste. That taste also has a particular political identity, however. In terms of literary texts, Wollstonecraft’s preference for Cowper’s poetry of feeling, community, and the natural world over Pope’s acerbic Tory satire is typical. Certainly, it reflects popular opinion at the end of the century, shaped by the “feminine” cult of sensibility; but Wollstonecraft’s selections also make clear the attraction of Cowper for a Dissenting, and incipiently radical, readership. Joseph Johnson had sent Wollstonecraft a copy of the two-volume edition of Cowper’s Poems which he published in 1787.36 Alongside reflections from The Task on domestic happiness, or a short poem comparing a “silent and chaste” stream to a “virtuous maid,” Wollstonecraft includes substantial extracts in which Cowper celebrates the common bonds between human beings or between humans and animals, as well as passages attacking the offences to liberty represented by slavery or the Bastille, where those common bonds are given specific political application. The Female Reader contains a wider generic range than does The Speaker, and Joseph Johnson publications are also well represented in Wollstonecraft’s choice of non-literary texts. She includes a generous selection from Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, for example, published by Johnson in 1788 in a translation by Henry Fuseli, with a frontispiece by William Blake. These moral reflections are alien to a modern taste, but were admired by the Johnson circle as a voice of European enlightenment humanism. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, the only woman writer in The Speaker (because of her membership of the Warrington group), appears in Wollstonecraft’s anthology as poet, but also as essayist; and, among other women writers, Wollstonecraft includes the educationists Sarah Trimmer (also published by Johnson) and Mme. de Genlis (whose Tales of the Castle had been translated in 1785 by the Jacobin novelist Thomas Holcroft).37 “Hack-work” for Joseph Johnson, then, is hack-work that nevertheless reflects the rigorous moral tastes of the English middle-class Enlightenment and invites women to participate in the program of intellectual and social inquiry which Dissenting writers shared with other radicals of Johnson’s circle.
Wollstonecraft’s as yet comparatively orthodox approach to gender difference must be understood in this intellectual context. The Female Reader begins with a quotation from John Gregory’s Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Mankind (1765): “As the two sexes have very different parts to act in life nature has marked their characters very differently, in a way that best qualifies them to fulfil their respective duties in society.” It is followed by Hester Chapone, who contrasts men’s pride in their “power, . . . wealth, dignity, learning, or abilities” with women’s desire simply that men “be in love with their persons, careless how despicable their minds appear,” and insists that “[t]he principal virtues or vices of a woman must be of a private and domestic kind” (FR:67). Wollstonecraft begins her course of improving reading with questions of difference and sameness: implicit approval of a gendered division of social responsibility is followed by a concern that women have allowed difference to render their minds “despicable.” She draws yet again on the female educationists’ familiar program of female mental improvement as a means of escape from fashionable uselessness. But she draws, too, on rationalist inquiries into categorisation and definition, and the responsibilities incurred by difference: in Gregory’s case, an inquiry influenced by his position within Scottish Enlightenment circles. Later in The Female Reader, for example, Wollstonecraft quotes Gregory’s comparison between animals and humans – the latter “distinguished by the moral sense” – and follows it immediately with Cowper’s mobilization of that moral sense through the sympathetic aesthetic of sensibility: “The heart is hard in nature, and unfit / For human fellowship . . . / . . . that is not pleas’d / With sight of animals enjoying life” (FR:288). Wollstonecraft prided herself on organizing the texts in The Female Reader into thematic groups, “carefully disposed in a series that tends to make them illustrate each other” (55). The anthology’s juxtapositions invite her readers to reflect on the relationship between rational improvement and moral responsibility – and on what it means to be a human, as well as a gendered, subject.
Central to the traditions of advice and instruction within which Wollstonecraft works, these are the questions which are to shape A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The less disruptive liberal sensibility of The Female Reader, however, stresses responsibilities rather than rights, difference rather than sameness. It can therefore easily accommodate a conduct writer like Gregory who, like other Scottish Enlightenment writers – and, of course, the periodical tradition going back to The Spectator – associates femininity with civilization and makes complementarity the basis of gender equality. Priding himself on his “honourable point of view,” Gregory sees women, “not as domestic drudges, or the slaves of our pleasures, but as our companions and equals; as designed to soften our hearts and polish our manners.”38 The Female Reader draws extensively both on Gregory’s Comparative View and on A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters. In Rights of Woman, however, Gregory’s well-meaning version of “equal” gender relations is subjected to extensive critique. Trained in advice traditions which value “a just and rational way of thinking of things” (Burgh, Thoughts on Education, 53), Wollstonecraft turns the Enlightenment scrutiny of categories back on itself, exposing the inequalities produced by definitions of difference and making careful distinctions within the category of advice writing itself.
In Wollstonecraft’s “Introduction” to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both the continuities and the breaks with the various advice traditions I have been discussing are immediately evident:
The conduct and manners of women . . . prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; . . . One cause . . . I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; . . . the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century . . . are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.
In a treatise, therefore, on female rights and manners, the works which have been particularly written for their improvement must not be overlooked; . . . the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions . . .
(VRW:73)
The moralists’ familiar opposition between superficiality and depth, irresponsibility and duty, structures Wollstonecraft’s introduction as it does the rest of Rights of Woman: in the sexualized juxtaposition of “alluring mistresses” with “affectionate wives and rational mothers”; and in Wollstonecraft’s concern that women should “exact respect” through the quality of their minds, “abilities and virtues,” rather than remaining content simply to “inspire love”, a concern that clearly echoes the extract from Hester Chapone which opens The Female Reader. Like most writers on conduct and education, Wollstonecraft continues to emphasize the duties of marriage and motherhood as women’s primary goal. “Do passive indolent women make the best wives?” she asks later in the text (103). And satirical attacks on feminine luxury and commercial excess continue to resonate in her scorn of those other women who “supinely dream life away in the lap of pleasure” and “have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch” (VRW:98, 125).
What is new here, however, is the polemical confidence with which Wollstonecraft attributes the unhealthy state of women’s minds to “books of instruction,” and to “men of genius” in particular, and makes “female rights” central to any discussion of women’s “conduct and manners.” As I have suggested, Wollstonecraft inherited a language of rational equality and liberty from the Dissenting educational project: a critique of “slavish fear and tyranny” (TED:23) which at times threatened to disrupt the more pragmatic and biddable advice offered in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. That language is again evident here: “rather as women than as human creatures”; “bubbled by this specious homage.” But it is now used self-consciously to expose the contradictions within discourses of female improvement, contradictions crystalized by Wollstonecraft’s involvement in French Revolutionary debates, and particularly by her devastating analysis, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, of Edmund Burke’s “libertine imagination,” the “Gothic gallantry” which underpinned both sexual and national systems of inequality (VRM:46, 37). In Rights of Woman, empowered by the daring and success of her earlier attack on so public a figure, she is ready to assert her political and intellectual independence further and to “effect a revolution in female manners” (VRW:114) by turning her critical gaze on other influential men: specifically, on those whose “books of instruction” had been formative in establishing a dominant cultural idea of femininity – but who had therefore also been central to her own intellectual development.
Milton, Rousseau, and John Gregory are the three writers singled out for treatment: Milton, the republican poet whose image of Edenic domesticity shaped eighteenth-century conceptions of sexual relations; Rousseau, Revolutionary political and educational theorist; and Gregory, author of a popular conduct book based in his Scottish Enlightenment humanism. Their prominence in Rights of Woman is indicative of the personal significance each held for Wollstonecraft. In each case, it is their symptomatic inconsistencies that she is concerned to analyze: inconsistencies which have a common end result, “to render women pleasing at the expence of every solid virtue”; and a common source, “into similar inconsistencies are great men often led by their senses” (VRW:91, 89). It is sexuality, in other words, seeping into the instructional relationship, which distorts women’s equal progress in intellectual, political, and domestic virtue.
Wollstonecraft freely acknowledges the centrality of Rousseau (with whom she confessed in a letter to being “half in love”39) to her vision of intellectual independence. Warning against the limitations of “mere instruction,” she cites Rousseau in support of her assertion that, though the “sagacious parent or tutor may strengthen the body and sharpen the instruments by which the child is to gather knowledge . . . the honey must be the reward of the individual’s own industry” (VRW:177, 183 and n.16). Elsewhere in the same chapter, however, he is vehemently attacked for the “eager fondness” (160) which leads him in Emile to exclude Sophie (and thus all women) from precisely that opportunity to exercise her own industry. Earlier in Rights of Woman, the political inconsistency arising from Milton’s fond representation of Eve comes under similar scrutiny. Milton “seems to coincide with me,” Wollstonecraft allows, quoting Adam’s plea for a mate: “Among unequals what society / Can sort, what harmony or true delight.”40 Yet in his description of “our first frail mother,” the political principle of equality “bends to the indefeasible right of beauty” (VRW:88–9). And John Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters, so extensively quoted in the early sections of The Female Reader and approached in Rights of Woman with “affectionate respect,” is ultimately judged to have had “the most baneful effect on the morals and manners of the female world” because it has “two objects in view”:
. . . wishing to make his daughters amiable, and fearing lest unhappiness should only be the consequence, of instilling sentiments that might draw them out of the track of common life without enabling them to act with consonant independence and dignity, he checks the natural flow of his thoughts, and neither advises one thing nor the other.
(VRW:166)
It is Gregory’s protective timidity which Wollstonecraft particularly objects to: fearful that his daughters will be hurt, he encourages a “system of dissimulation,” a “desire of being always women” which is “the very consciousness that degrades the sex” (168, 169). The anxiety of the father is allowed to compromise an enlightened faith in ungendered transparency: “a cultivated understanding, and an affectionate heart [which] will never want starched rules of decorum” (167).
The approval, however qualified, allowed to these men of the Enlightenment sharply differentiates them from the only other text analyzed in any detail in Wollstonecraft’s chapter on “Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity.” James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women were, as Wollstonecraft points out, “frequently put into the hands of young people” (VRW:166). First published in 1766, their popularity was similar to that of Gregory’s Legacy and Wollstonecraft makes clear that this is why she has “taken more notice of them than, strictly speaking, they deserve” (166).41 Fordyce is neither cited nor quoted in either Thoughts or The Female Reader: a clear measure of his unacceptability when Wollstonecraft was prepared to draw on George Savile’s Advice to a Daughter for conventional warnings against vanity or even on Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son on the dangers of indolence (FR:138–41, 128). Just why Fordyce was so unacceptable becomes clear when Wollstonecraft quotes one of his most absurd, but also most dangerous, passages: “They [women] are timid, and want to be defended. They are frail; o do not take advantage of their weakness. Let their fears and blushes endear them.”42 Such “lover-like phrases of pumped up passion,” she objects, sin against both “sense and taste”: “I have heard rational men use the word indecent, when they mentioned them with disgust” (VRW:163–4). As Wollstonecraft’s analysis reveals, Fordyce shares other male advice writers’ sexually compromised attitude to women, but what she calls his “sentimental rant” signals a significantly different quality of infantilizing sexual prurience, unmitigated even by “the language of the heart” (163), much less by any wider belief in liberty or equality.
Wollstonecraft’s careful discriminations between Gregory and Fordyce are based in stylistic analysis. In The Female Reader, Wollstonecraft’s program of carefully chosen texts was intended to “imprint some useful lessons on the mind, and cultivate the taste at the same time” (FR:55). As in the periodical tradition, a refined taste is seen as inseparable from moral and intellectual improvement. The method of The Female Reader, the exercise of rational taste through close reading, is central to Wollstonecraft’s political analysis of advice writings in Rights of Woman. Gregory’s ideological inconsistency is signaled by the conjunction of an “easy familiar style,” which invites confidence and respect, with “a degree of concise elegance . . . that disturbs this sympathy” (VRW:166). Fordyce’s stylistic sins against taste, the “cold artificial feelings” on display in his “affected style,” are continuous with his tyrannic reduction of women to “house slave[s]” and “domestic drudge[s]” (163, 162, 165). But because of this, Wollstonecraft believes, both his sexual politics and his mode of instruction are doomed to failure: “esteem, the only lasting affection, can alone be obtained by virtue supported by reason. It is respect for the understanding that keeps alive tenderness for the person” (166).
Wollstonecraft’s discriminating analysis here makes manifest the complex effects of advice writing for women. Her own ambivalent response to Gregory, particularly, is at one level symptomatic of precisely those gendered power relations which the intimate form of address in many conduct books insidiously perpetuates: Wollstonecraft herself registers daughterly affection for the “familiar” authority of the father’s voice, one effect of which, as she clearly sees, can be to lull women into “a system of slavery” exactly comparable to “the servility in absolute monarchies” (101, 105). Far worse, however, she suggests, is the complete lack of either rational or affective esteem for women revealed by Fordyce’s cold linguistic excess: his Sermons “have contributed to vitiate the taste, and enervate the understanding of many of my fellow-creatures” (166). The tendency of both Gregory’s and Fordyce’s texts is to encourage women to focus on their gendered, rather than their shared human, identity. But Wollstonecraft is alert (as she was in the case of Burke) to the sexual threat in Fordyce’s predatory “voluptuousness,” by which “all women are to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance” (165). Gregory’s sympathetic esteem, by contrast, like that of other advice writers for whom conduct and manners are inseparable from a wider horizon of education and “improvement,” at least implicitly acknowledges a potentially productive “respect for the understanding.”
Rational independence for women is the goal of Wollstonecraft’s own, transformed, advice book: a human ideal which she contrasts constantly with the gendered “art of pleasing,” through which, a certain kind of advice literature persuades its female readers, they will achieve power (97). “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves” is Wollstonecraft’s forceful response; “[t]he conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God?” (131, 105). Control over the self; right conduct; accountability; regulation; religious aspiration; an emphasis on intellectual substance over superficial pleasure: the vocabularies of duty and discipline through which Wollstonecraft envisages her “revolution in female manners” are still recognizably derived from the program of improvement offered in eighteenth-century moral traditions. But for Wollstonecraft, the virtue which is the object of that self-discipline is an absolute: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues.” Too often in advice writing, Wollstonecraft suggests, the effect of gender is that “virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience” (120). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft makes her feminist declaration of independence by exposing that inconsistency from within.
1. VRW 5:97.
2. TED 4:25.
3. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 24, 66.
4. Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740), quoted in Kathryn Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement,” Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31. Wollstonecraft approved of Chapone’s Letters; see VRW 5:174.
5. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), 29.
6. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 172.
7. See Vivien Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature”, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 108–32.
8. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed. Vivien Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 51.
9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 8, lines 601–2.
10. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Women, ed. Jones, 132.
11. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady’s New Years Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), Women, ed. Jones, 18, 19.
12. Sarah Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters (1761), The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor (1790), ed. Vivien Jones (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 96, 102.
13. M 1:73.
14. [James Burgh], Thoughts on Education (London: G. Freer; M. Cooper, 1747), 52–3.
15. Wollstonecraft includes the first two sentences of this quotation in FR 4:68.
16. Paradise Lost, Book 8, lines 602–5
17. Richard Price, A Sermon delivered to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters at Hackney . . . (1779), quoted in D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: the Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 69.
18. “A Sound Mind in a sound Body, is a short, but full Description of a Happy State in this World,” John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 83.
19. Savile in Women, ed. Jones, 21; Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London: H. Hughs for J. Walter, 1773), 2:97.
20. Alexander Pope, “An Epistle to a Lady. Of the Characters of Women” (1735), lines 245, 248; Edward Moore, Fables for the Female Sex (1744), “Fable II: The Panther, the Horse and Other Beasts,” Young Lady’s Pocket Library, ed. Jones, 193. Wollstonecraft includes “Fable III: The Nightingale, and Glow-worm” in FR 4:269–70.
21. The Spectator, 10 (12 March 1711).
22. The Spectator, 15 (17 March 1711).
23. Wollstonecraft includes extracts not just from The Spectator, but also from The Guardian, The World, The Lounger, The Mirror, and The Connoisseur, and from Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Adventurer.
24. See Pope, “Epistle to a Lady,” lines 1–2: “Nothing so true as what you once let fall, / ‘Most Women have no Characters at all.’”
25. Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One,’” Feminist Studies 20:3 (1994), 453–73.
26. Quoted in FR 4:114.
27. VRM 5:37, 48.
28. The Lady’s Magazine 18 (1787), 227–30, 287, 369–70; Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more important Duties of Life. To which is added Fenolon [sic] Archbishop of Cambray’s Instructions to a Governess, and an Address to Mothers (Dublin: W. Sleator, 1788), sig. [4]r. Since one of the added chapters refers approvingly to James Fordyce, we can safely assume they are not by Wollstonecraft.
29. Wollstonecraft’s preference for “a cultivated mind” appears in TED 32, in a passage reproduced in The Lady’s Magazine 18:288.
30. FR 4:55.
31. Pennington, Unfortunate Mother’s Advice, 86–7.
32. Moira Ferguson, Introduction, The Female Reader (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimilies and Reprints, 1980), XXViii. And this in spite of its being published (perhaps to give it a spurious kind of authority) under the name of “Mr. Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution” rather than Wollstonecraft’s own. Gary Kelly describes The Female Reader as “hack-work” in Revolutionary Feminism, 73.
33. The Spectator 10 (12 March 1711).
34. See P. O’Brien, The Warrington Academy 1757–1786: Its Predecessors and Successors (Wigan: Owl Books, 1989), 71; Review of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Monthly Review 8 (1792), 198–209.
35. See William Enfield, The Speaker: or, Miscellaneous Pieces, selected from the Best English Writers, and disposed under proper heads, with a view to facilitate the improvement of youth in Reading and Speaking, a new edition, corrected (London: J. Johnson, 1786); “Dress subservient to useful Purposes” is the title given by Wollstonecraft to an extract from Sarah Trimmer’s The Oeconomy of Charity (London: J. Johnson, 1787).
36. Letters, 138.
37. See Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979).
38. Gregory, Legacy, Young Lady’s Pocket Library, ed. Jones, 3.
39. Letters, 263.
40. Paradise Lost, Book 8, lines 383–4.
41. In chapter 14 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mr Collins attempts to read to the Bennet sisters from Fordyce’s Sermons.
42. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, in Two Volumes, 3rd edn., corrected (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1766), 1:99–100.