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Chapter 28 - Conduct Literature
- from Legal and Social Culture
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- By Vivien Jones
- Edited by Nancy E. Johnson, State University of New York, New Paltz, Paul Keen, Carleton University, Ottawa
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- Book:
- Mary Wollstonecraft in Context
- Published online:
- 16 January 2020
- Print publication:
- 06 February 2020, pp 238-245
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Summary
Mary Wollstonecraft was both a writer and a fierce critic of what we now loosely define as “conduct literature.” In one of the most powerful chapters in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her searing “Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” focus particularly on two of the most popular advice texts of the period, James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774). But her first publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was in many respects an orthodox piece of advice writing. Indeed, some passages in Thoughts strongly echo Gregory’s views, and Wollstonecraft included several excerpts from his writings in her anthology The Female Reader (1789). These perhaps unexpected continuities are a valuable reminder of the wide spectrum of texts and writers offering guidance on girls’ and women’s education and behavior in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and of the danger in making ahistorical assumptions about their identity and effects. At the same time, the shifts in Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Gregory indicate her increasingly sophisticated alertness to the workings of textual politics and provide insight into the radicalizing effects of French Revolutionary ideas on her intellectual development.
5 - Frances Burney
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- By Vivien Jones
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
- Published online:
- 28 March 2010
- Print publication:
- 10 December 2009, pp 80-97
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Summary
Had this collection of essays been produced only a decade - certainly two decades - ago, it is by no means certain that Frances Burney would have been included. To her contemporaries and immediate successors, Burney (1752-1840) was a major figure: an innovative pioneer in the development of the novel and a significant contributor to its rapid growth in status and respectability at the end of the eighteenth century. Following the publication of her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), critics and influential cultural commentators such as Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu hailed Burney as successor to the already highly respected male novelists of the mid-century. Her fiction was seen to combine 'the dignity and pathos of Richardson' with 'the acuteness and ingenuity of Fielding'. Jane Austen's well-known defence of novels in Northanger Abbey cites Cecilia, together with Burney's third novel, Camilla (1796), as exemplars of the form 'in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language'. And Anna Letitia Barbauld included all three novels in her monumental canon-making collection, The British Novelists (1810), prefacing them with the by then established judgement that: 'Scarcely any name, if any, stands higher in the list of novel-writers than that of Miss Burney. ' But with the publication in 1814 of Burney's fourth and final novel, The Wanderer, her canonical status began to look more precarious - and it remained so, until feminist and historicist critics at the end of the twentieth century (re)discovered how to read her fiction in ways which have begun to restore her to a deservedly more secure position.
7 - Burney and gender
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- By Vivien Jones
- Edited by Peter Sabor, McGill University, Montréal
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney
- Published online:
- 28 September 2007
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2007, pp 111-130
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Summary
The first of only two occasions on which Jane Austen sanctioned the appearance of her name in print was in the subscription list to Burney's Camilla - a significant tribute by the aspirant 'Miss J. Austen, Steventon' to the woman novelist whose work was, by 1796, widely acknowledged to be 'without a competitor' or, if comparisons were made, to equal that of Richardson and Henry Fielding. When Austen paid tribute to Burney again, more famously, in her defence of novels in Northanger Abbey, she named Cecilia and Camilla, together with Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), as examples of works 'in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language' (I, ch. v). For modern readers, at least until twentieth-century feminist criticism rediscovered and properly reinstated women writers, Austen herself was the earliest female novelist to be allowed into the literary canon. But for contemporaries, it was Burney who first broke through the prejudices of gender and genre - her own, as well as those of her reviewers - to achieve unequivocal canonical status as a practitioner of the new form of the novel. Beginning with the acclaim which greeted the anonymous publication of Evelina in 1778, Burney's career and reputation and the emergent, but still fragile, respectability of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century are crucially interdependent. Indeed, Austen's assertive celebration of fiction not only as displaying 'the greatest powers of the mind', but also as a form whose greatest living exemplars are women, was possible largely because of the critical respect won by Burney.
8 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction
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- By Vivien Jones
- Edited by Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 30 May 2002, pp 119-140
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Summary
In 1789, Wollstonecraft included extracts from John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, one of the most popular of eighteenth-century conduct books, in her anthology The Female Reader; in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she claimed to “entirely disapprove of his celebrated Legacy,” and Gregory was among those singled out as “writers who have rendered women objects of pity.” On the face of it, this looks like a radical change of opinion: a clear symptom of a newly politicized Wollstonecraft explicitly rejecting the kind of advice literature which she had been prepared to reproduce, and even to emulate, as a struggling freelance writer in the late 1780s but which, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the early 1790s, she recognized as one of those repressive cultural mechanisms responsible for turning women into mere “creatures of sensation” (VRW:130). But to read this as a straightforward volt face on Wollstonecraft's part would be far too simple an account of her view of Gregory, or of the wider tradition of female conduct literature which his text represents. Furthermore, it would be a serious misunderstanding of Wollstonecraft's relationship with the multifarious genre of advice writing more generally. As an autodidact, and then as an independent woman trying to make a living from her writing, Wollstonecraft relied throughout her life on those instructional genres through which moral principles and enlightenment knowledges were offered up to a popular audience. Her first publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was a kind of conduct book, and Rights of Woman itself still bears a more than passing resemblance to the genre. In each case, advice on “improvement” is a primary characteristic, and the moral agenda which underpins this urge to (self-)improvement means that distinctions between attaining proper standards of personal “conduct,” defining oneself as a virtuous domestic woman, aspiring to an appropriate education, and simply expanding one's knowledge, can become blurred: for modern readers, often uncomfortably so.