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Reviews Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. 332 pp. $45.00 ($17.95 cloth). Ruth Perry's biography of Mary Astell probes the way in which the eighteenth century social, political and cultural world affected the life of this "early English feminist ." Perry identifies her study with the feminist biographies of the last two decades, which have been finding new ways to tell women's stories and which have focussed, as Jean Strouse, the biographer of Alice James, suggests in an interview with The Boston Globe (October 14, 1984), "on the feedback between culture and character." Perry gives us a portrait of a woman who was representative of the conservative ideas of the Augustan Age of Reason, but who, at the same time, because of her views on the intellectual and social position of women, was an outsider to the establishment. Born in 1666 in Newcastle, England, into an upper-middle-class family, she was formed by Tory politics and by Anglican spirituality, and she was educated by her uncle in typical Enlightenment rationality. Perry argues that the very influences that made Astell part of the Augustan intellectual milieu also helped to form her feminism. Her belief in her own rational capabilities as a woman led her to argue that women have the potential for intellectual equality with men. "If God had not intended that women should use their Reason, He would not have given them any," she wrote in "The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England" (1705). Astell's three feminist books, "A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest" (Part I in 1694 and Part II in 1697) and "Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Occasion'd by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine's Case" (1700), were radical in their description of women's social and intellectual position, but they did not analyze the underlying cultural and legal forces that put women in this disadvantaged position in the patriarchy. In "A Serious Proposal" Astell pointed out to women their piteous lack of education and she advocated the establishment of a "female college" or as she also called it, "a Protestant nunnery," 182 biography Vol. 11, No. 2 where women could learn to value their minds and could enjoy a "religious retreat." Her Proposal did not seek to make radical changes in the social structure that judged women only in relationship to their husbands, but rather it offered a haven for women who did not marry or even a temporary retreat for women who eventually did marry. In "Some Reflections Upon Marriage," Astell describes the helpless dependency of women on their husbands for their legal, social and financial status. She urged women to choose independence through remaining single, but for those who could not or would not choose the single life, she had no solution other than to embrace marriage as a religious trial or duty. Mary Astell chose the single life and Perry's biography portrays this life as a fable of independence and enterprise. The independence was won at the cost of joining the socially despised category of "spinster" and of living on very limited financial means. When Mary Astell was twelve, her father, who was a Newcastle coal merchant, died, leaving the family impoverished; when she was eighteen, her mother died, leaving her on her own. Believing in her own worth and ability, Mary left for London at twenty to seek her fortune. In London, when she found her meager resources gone, she appealed to the Anglican Archbishop Sancroft for help, dedicating to him a collection of her poems. He responded generously and helped her with gifts of money but also with valuable contacts. She became part of a community of aristocratic "learned" women in Chelsea where she settled. As Perry notes, her friends were her disciples as well as her patrons. The Tory bookseller, Rich Wilkin, published her works, including the feminist books which won her instant recognition. Her success in writing about women's issues was not matched by the same success in her writings about politics and religion. For...

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