Abstract

This essay closely reads Hester Mulso Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) to create a model of limited interpretive authority. This model of reading acknowledges Chapone's transgressive impulses in presenting women with an intellectually rigorous program of reading while insisting that we attend to the text's acquiescence to beliefs about gendered ways of reading and thinking. This model of limited interpretive authority, or compliance with established and traditional reading practices, allows those studying the history of reading to more productively describe and understand the submissive or compliant readers often overlooked in liberatory and oppositional accounts of reading practices.

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