Abstract
Celebrated courtesans Sophia Baddeley (1745-1786), Mary Robinson (1757-1800), and Elizabeth Fox (née Armistead) (1750-1842) crossed paths in London’s fashionable social spaces, in their relationships with an aristocratic fraternity, and as celebrities of the gossip columns. Some years later, Regency courtesan Harriette Wilson (1786-1845) and her rival Julia Johnstone (1777—date unknown) would inherit their legacy and reshape the role of courtesan for the early nineteenth century. These women rejected the model of the patriarchal family and, in their life writing, they explore alternative forms of identification and connection, including friendship, maternity, patronage, widowhood, and literary and social networks. They also engage in complex identifications with the woman of fashion, which enables them to adopt aristocratic modes of literary authority in opposition to the image of the professional middle-class writer who has dominated ideas of eighteenth-century authorship. Courtesans are traditionally associated with self-vindication and the scandalous memoir, but these authors also experiment with auto/biography, the family memoir, a manuscript journal, the roman à clef, and sentimental and silver-fork fiction. The commercial and literary transactions that underpin the representations of these ‘scandalous’ lives also provide insights into print and manuscript culture and textual collaborations in the period.
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Notes
Caroline Breashears, ‘Scandalous Categories: Classifying the Memoirs of Unconventional Women’, Philological Quarterly, 82.2 (2003), 187–212 (200).
Examples include Katie Hickman, Courtesans (London: Harper Perennial, 2003)
Frances Wilson, The Courtesan’s Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King (London: Faber and Faber, 2003)
Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (London: HarperCollins, 2004)
Virginia Rounding, Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four NineteenthCentury Courtesans (London: Bloomsbury, 2004)
Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 73.
Town and Country Magazine; or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment, March (1779), 121–5 and Town and Country, May (1780), 233–6. See Cindy McCreery, ‘Keeping Up with the Bon Ton: The Tête-à-Tête Series in the Town and Country Magazine’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997), 207–29.
See Gillian Russell for an analysis of the ways in which the rational, manly discourse of the republic of letters defined itself against the effeminate, trivializing, quotidian, licentious gossip associated with fashionable sociability in this period. Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229.
Muireann O’Cinneide, Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 18.
Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 150.
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
For a discussion of George Anne Bellamy’s self-presentation as a heroine of sensibility, see Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 109–26.
Vivien Jones, ‘Scandalous Femininity: Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 54–70 (62).
For an analysis of the combination of sentiment and satire in the scandalous memoir, see Lynda M. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of’Publick Fame’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 67–70 and
Amy Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire of Sophia Baddeley’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 48.3 (2008), 677–92.
Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), 144–67 (167).
Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 199–200; Thompson and Nussbaum also suggest that in their claims to a unique, interior selfhood these authors, in some respects, anticipate Romantic forms of autobiography. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’, 157, 163
Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 179.
Julie Peakman, ‘Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography’, Women’s Writing, 11.2 (2004), 163–84 (180).
Caroline Breashears, ‘The Female Appeal Memoir: Genre and Female Literary Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England’, Modern Philology, 107.4 (2010), 607–31 (608). The difficulties of definition are evident in the various categorisations of Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs. Breashears includes it in her account of the appeal memoir, Peakman discusses it in her essay on whore biography, and Thompson refers to Wilson as a scandalous memoirist. In the Chawton House Library series, the memoirs of Harriette Wilson and Julia Johnstone appear as ‘Whore Biographies’ and the memoirs of Mary Robinson and Sophia Baddeley are included in ‘Women’s Theatrical Memoirs’.
Clare Brant, ‘Speaking of Women: Scandal and the Law in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds), Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 (London: Routledge, 1992), 242–70 (243).
Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’, x; Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 46
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660–1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989), 128–31.
Julia Johnstone, Confessions of Julia Johnstone, Written by Herself in Julie Peakman (ed.), Whore Biographies, 1700–1825, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–2007), vol. 8, 12.
G. Thomas Couser, Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 155.
Leah Sumbel, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sumbel, in Sue McPherson, Sharon M. Setzer, and Julia Swindells (eds), Women’s Theatrical Memoirs, 10 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), vols 9–10, vol. 9, 378, 275.
Mary Robinson, Memoirs of Mrs. Mary Robinson, in Hester Davenport (ed.), The Works of Mary Robinson, William D. Brewer (ed.), 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), vol. 7, 264.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 12.
Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, A. C. Elias, Jr (ed.), 2 vols (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. 2, 88.
Constantia Phillips, An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips, in Dianne Dugaw (ed.), Memoirs of Scandalous Women, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), vol. 1, 81, 163.
Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 4.
Daniel Cook, ‘An Authoress to be Let: Reading Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs’, in Daniel Cook and Amy Culley (eds), Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 39–54 (40–2).
Linda H. Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 28.
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). The Life Writing of Late Eighteenth-Century and Regency Courtesans. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_7
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