Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England by Leonie Hannan (review)

I sympathize strongly with the two aims of this often-illuminating book, clearly spelled out in its introduction. The first: to establish that the eighteenth-century familiar letter, as written by women, was not merely a vehicle for transmitting news, doing business, or sharing sentiments, but also a crucial medium for intellectual development (what Hannan, borrowing from the late Sylvia H. Myers, calls “the life of the mind”). The second: to increase awareness of the wide variety of women who used their letter-writing as a means to that development. As someone who has spent decades studying the Bluestockings and their letters, I found Hannan’s thesis not only true but bracing. Thus, it came as a disappointment to discover that her insights and workmanship were not consistently strong. Parts of her treatment are valuable; other sections are weakened by poor writing and dubious argument.

The book is clearly organized, with a substantial introduction describing its aims, subjects, theoretical assumptions, and archival sources. The three-part, six-chapter structure accommodates the dual aims of Hannan’s investigation, which, I should add, is charted chronologically according to the normative eighteenth-century female “life-cycle.” That is, the book does not proceed historically from 1660 to 1750, though this is the time-frame of the writers she studies, and she does note important differences between early- and late-century writers. Instead, she begins with chapters on “Getting started” and “Becoming an intellectual,” featuring writers early in their lives and then in subsequent chapters returns to these same writers as they age. Hannan emphasizes that women of this time could not produce intellectual output—epistolary or otherwise—on a predictable schedule over the course of their lives due to “life-cycle” realities. Her point—and it is an important one—is that female writers (even in the modest epistolary form) could not uninterruptedly engage in the “life of the mind” when the life of the childbed and the nursery so often intervened.

The ten letter writers considered include some familiar names (Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Elstob) and some perhaps not (Mary Browne Evelyn, Jemima and Mary Grey, Mary Clarke, Anne Dormer). While I question the usefulness of featuring both Talbot and Elstob—who have been treated at length in previous scholarship—the extended discussion of Mary Browne Evelyn (c.1635–1709) is particularly interesting. Evelyn (wife of John Evelyn, the writer and diarist) appears several times during her “life-cycle,” and the main inference about her is that she had it best early in that cycle. We first read about her in chapter 2, where the focus is on Mary’s letter exchange with Ralph Bohun, her son’s tutor. Bohun encouraged not only son but mother as well, inducing Mary to agree to have her witty and learned letters shared with members of the Royal Society, who would admire her unusual talents, he assured her. Thus, Hannan suggests, began the happiest stage in Evelyn’s life, one unencumbered with multiple children or burdensome domesticity. But as more children arrived so did demands on Evelyn’s time and energy, and due to the “rigors of the female life-cycle” she was forced to retire from the semi-public world of intellectual exchange. Not only did she demur from publishing her ideas (a fact much lamented by Hannan), she even retreated from her guest role in a convivial learned society. Why did she do this?

Hannan quotes from a highly interesting letter of 1674, which she describes as a “reversal of policy” containing a “stinging appraisal of the limited domestic existence open to women” and a termination of “[Evelyn’s] epistolary involvement in academic life.” In the choicest part of this letter Evelyn tells Bohun that her recent silence had nothing to do with “the diversities of the towne.” She confesses, “the reall cause it is yr expectation of extraordinary notions...