Abstract
British women writers provide rich and, at times, deeply moving accounts of their visits to Revolutionary France after 1789, which complicate existing critical histories of women’s life writing. Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) arrived in Paris in 1790 and 1792 respectively as professional writers and supporters of the revolutionary cause. Royalist Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1758(?)–1823), or ‘Daily the Tall’ as she was known in the gossip columns, resided in Paris as courtesan to Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans from 1786, and Charlotte West (dates unknown) presents herself as a loyal patriot and Protestant Englishwoman living in France from 1787 to 1797. All four women reject domestic and familial roles, and in their writing explore alternative models of affiliation across and within national borders. They are highly innovative in their generic experiments, combining autobiography, travel writing, political and historical narratives, and sentimental fiction. They also share a faith in proximity and personal experience as valuable sources of authority and envisage their writing as a contribution to the politics and collective memories of the age. British women writers’ involvement in the French Revolution has been the focus of critical interest in recent years, but the Revolution’s place in a history of women’s auto/biography is in need of further theorisation.
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Notes
Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 5.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 53–4.
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The phrase is taken from Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), 170.
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). The Life Writing of British Women and the French Revolution. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_12
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