Frances Brooke’s Emancipatory Sensibility

Frances Brooke’s Emancipatory Sensibility centers on an outstanding woman writer whose educational beliefs were consistently liberal and generously favored freedoms that allowed for mistakes as a way of acquiring experience. Brooke also believed in inborn virtue, and her cultural engagement with related philosophies of the human mind and its cultivation deserves greater scholarly attention.

This is the first study to comprehensively discuss her ideas on education, while also paying attention to Brooke’s own learning experiences in the burgeoning London publishing industry. Organized chronologically, the book guides the reader through Brooke’s career and engagement with diverse genres—novels, tragedy, librettos, and essays—that reflect her artistic versatility, feminist convictions, and business resolve. Furthermore, Brooke’s endeavors required increasing amounts of resources, expertise, and recognition—all of which she had to work particularly hard to acquire as a woman, and for which she risked a reputation that was essential to her desired goals.

Through comprehensive analysis, the study illuminates Brooke's sustained engagement with how fiction shapes moral and social formation.

Dr. Michaela Vance is a researcher in eighteenth-century literature specializing in theories of education, virtue, and narrative. She has published on the role of the humanities in military education, focusing on critical and creative thinking. Her first monograph is the result of over a decade of research on Brooke, having begun as a PhD thesis at Stockholm University. Based in Stockholm with her husband Shawn, daughters Saga and Vera, and perpetual puppy Peralta, she teaches English at the Swedish Defence University.