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First American Edition, first printing. (published in UK 2024). Hard cover, 8vo, in blue paper-covered boards, with silver titles and in the original pictorial dust jacket. 338pp. CONDITION: Fine, like new. **A really interesting portrait of some of the most active eighteenth-century British intellectual women, examining their particular social networks, ideas inspiring parliamentary and educational reform, human rights as well as their connection to the larger world of French and American republican movements. Included is a discussion of how self-imposed misogyny based on ideas of traditional gender roles worked against them, both within their own feminine ranks, and without, with the merciless judgement by some notable men of the era. The abolitionist and Romantic poet Ann Yearlsey (1753-1856), with her most famous work, "A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade," of 1788, had to fight a female patron in order to retain the right to her own creative work. The hugely accomplished historian Catherine Macaulay (1731-1791), whose six-volumes of English history are still read today, and whose contemporary connections to the republican movements of the times lead her to correspondence with the likes of Benjamin Franklin, a visit to America where she met George Washington, and acclaim among the revolutionary brigades of France, was effectively derailed from a stunning career as a political philosopher by male and female condemnation of her love life. Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney, Anna Seward, and Lady Elizabeth Montagu her sister Lady Barbara, friend Sarah Scott are all considered. A very well-crafted and necessary counter-point to the more-often told tales of male conferees of the Midlands Enlightenment, such as Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Johnson.
Ref: FEMST 9260
$40.00