Elizabeth P. Porter

The book project examines how feminism is defined and women are narrativized in long eighteenth-century British literary history. Literary genres such as the novel, travel narrative, and letter constellate around women who often seek bonds with other women, often across differences of class or race. Often, these plots or narrative threads instantiate a fiction that still persists in feminism: that women are all “in it” together. In what is now referred to as “white feminism” or “mainstream feminism,” white elite women often critique patriarchy without considering other systems of oppression, or their own power dynamics with other women. Such “feminist fictions” were in construction in the era under study, and this legacy is instructive for feminism in its present and future orientations. Drawing on methods and theories from women's and gender studies, the project investigates the literary construction of gender hierarchies that form the shaky foundation of feminist criticism. Chapters analyze the correspondence of the “Bluestocking” coteries, novels of Frances Burney and Amelia Opie, travel narratives from Lady Nugent and Sophie von la Roche, and the oeuvre and afterlives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.