British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Teresa Barnard (review)

This diverse and stimulating collection of essays about women who challenged gender boundaries in the 18^th century is grouped according to three categories: science, religion, and politics with philosophy. Some of the women discussed in these chapters have already been extensively written about, but hitherto unexplored areas of their work are uncovered here, while other chapters introduce women whose contribution to the intellectual life of the 18^th century has been unrecognized. Taking the strategic version of feminism expressed by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in her poem “The Rights of Women” (1792) as the inspiration for this collection, Teresa Barnard and Ruth Watts introduce the context for these essays: the women to whom the collection is devoted intervened in masculine discourses, but they were disadvantaged by lack of education, travel experience, and networks available to men.

The essays dealing with contributions to science range from Mary Wortley Montagu’s role in the introduction of smallpox vaccinations in Britain, the research into and description of volcanoes by poets Anna Seward and Eleanor Anne Porden Franklin, and finally Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing on pediatrics. Daniel Grey notes that there has been much critical work on Montagu’s fiction and her accounts of her visits to Turkey but very little about her influence on the introduction of smallpox vaccination. She was seriously affected in her personal life by the disease, and her poem “The Small Pox” (1716) records this. Her attempts to hide the disfigurement by experimenting with Turkish remedies were disastrous. Grey investigates the origins of inoculation in the Middle East and China. He sets Montagu’s activity in the context of the work of female medics such as Judith Drake, noting the barriers that women faced. He suggests that Montagu knew the Royal Society publications on the subject and the 1714 report by Emanuele Timonim, physician to the British Embassy in Constantinople, before she had her son and later her daughter inoculated. She became an active campaigner in defence of the vaccine. Her anonymous challenge to detractors of the practice was only attributed to her in the mid-twentieth century. She continued to recommend the remedy through personal influence, which Grey suggests was significant for the gradual acceptance of inoculation and its role in reducing the serious damage of the disease.

Teresa Barnard’s own article assesses how two contemporary poets were inspired by a topical interest in volcanoes. Women were excluded from scientific debates by lack of education, and contemptuous chauvinistic satire, similar to that which ridiculed women travellers. Franklin acquired her knowledge of science at the Royal Institution public lectures and at informal meetings. She was particularly interested in geology, and her epic poem The Veils (1815) introduces, as does Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rosicrucian doctrine from medieval natural philosophy. In The Veils, influenced by Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden (1791), geological detail is combined with poetic imagination.

Anna Seward, the other woman poet who was inspired by descriptions of volcanoes, was invited by Darwin to collaborate on this poem. She did not accept his invitation, but she did write an introduction. Subsequently, she was moved by Patrick Brydone’s description of Mount Etna to compose a poetic description of an erupting volcano. Although she did not travel beyond England herself, she read Brydone and Sir William Hamilton, and supported her descriptive poetry with informative footnotes. Barnard closely analyses how Seward’s poetry made Brydone’s scientific descriptions and explanations of Etna more accessible. The chapter sheds new light on the intellectual explorations of women writers who were disadvantaged by their exclusion from male networks and by their limited opportunities for travel.

Malini Roy draws attention to unfinished letters by Mary Wollstonecraft on child-rearing, a subject of great interest following the work of philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who advocated more freedom for the child to develop an “authentic” self under the influence of Nature. Theories about good practice in childbirth became polarized between...