The Odds and the Ends: What to Do With Some Letters of Catharine Macaulay

This article argues that Catharine Macaulay’s correspondence calls for alternatives to recovery as the dominant methodology of interpretation for women’s texts. Macaulay’s relative obscurity and the almost complete obscurity of her friends relieve the letters of the burden of canonicity. Rather than instances of “women’s writing,” exceptional personhood, or disclosure of historical and biographical data, the letters can become documents of the effects of epistolary traffic. Reading how the once famous “female historian” and her friends cultivated epistolary exchanges and personas, the essay examines how letters document the writers’ relationship to writing, a medium whose circulation makes explicit its limitations as a vehicle of representation and social convention. These limitations help to refine methodological procedures that define the role of letters in textual interpretation and make gender relevant to literary scholarship.