A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759-1820

Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women's literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the 18th century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of women's progress from the rarified atmosphere of mid- 18th-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early 19th century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion's role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women's literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use women's progress to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalising schemas of development. See more