Vocational Philanthropy and British Women's Writing, 1790–1810
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A01=Patricia Comitini
Author_Patricia Comitini
benevolent femininity
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=NH
Category=NHTB
Cheap Repository Tracts
class and gender relations
Common Language
Edgeworth's Fiction
Edgeworth's Popular Tales
Edgeworth's Tales
Edgeworth’s Fiction
Edgeworth’s Popular Tales
Edgeworth’s Tales
Eighteenth Century Political Economist
eighteenth-century gender studies
Elizabeth Inchbald
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Farmer Gray
grasmere
Grasmere Journal
Harriet Freke
journal
Laboring Class Life
Laboring Class Woman
Lady Delacour
literacy and social mobility
literary philanthropy
Mary Wollstonecraft
Moral Tales
Orderly Train
social reform literature
Todd Sensibility
Universal Benevolence
Vanishing Mediator
Vocational Philanthropy
Wollstonecraft Positions
Wollstonecraft's Text
Wollstonecraft’s Text
women writers shaping class identity
Wordsworth Circle
Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal
Wordsworth's Journal
Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal
Wordsworth’s Journal
Product details
- ISBN 9780367882426
- Weight: 330g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 12 Dec 2019
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Patricia Comitini's study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of the ways in which evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational to constructions of class and gender roles, Comitini argues that these changes enabled a particular kind of feminine benevolence that was linked to women's work as writers. The term 'vocational philanthropy' is suggestive of the ways that women used their status as professional writers to instruct men and women in changing gender relations, and to educate the middling and laboring classes in their new roles during a socially and economically turbulent era. Examining works by Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Dorothy Wordsworth, whose writing crosses generic, political, and social boundaries, Comitini shows how women from diverse backgrounds shared a commitment to philanthropy - fostering the love of mankind - and an interest in the social nature of literacy. Their writing fosters sentiments that they hoped would be shared between the sexes and among the classes in English society, forging new reading audiences among women and the lower classes. These writers and their writing exemplify the paradigm of vocational philanthropy, which gives people not money, but texts to read, in order to imagine societal improvement. The effect was to permit the emergence of middle-class values linking private notions of morality, family, and love to the public needs for good citizens, industrious laborers, and class consolidation.
Patricia Comitini is Associate Professor of English, Quinnipiac University, USA
