Making space: English women, letter-writing, and the life of the mind, c.1650-1750

This article uses women's letter-writing from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to explore the home as a site of female intellectual endeavour. Far from representing a static backdrop to the action of domestic life, the home played a dynamic role in women's experiences of the life of the mind and shaped the ways in which women thought and wrote. Letters were penned in dining rooms, parlours and closets, by firesides, and on desks and laps. In their letters, women projected images of themselves scribbling epistles to friends in order to maintain their mental intimacy. Space was both real and imagined and the physical realities of a hand-written and hand-delivered letter gave way to the imaginative possibilities brought by networks of epistolary exchange and the alternative spaces of creative thought. By reinstating the home more fully in the history of female intellectual experience, a more nuanced view of the domestic arena can be developed: one that sees the home not as a site of exclusion and confinement, but as a space for scholarship and exchange. 

Popular Writers: Women Historians, the Academic Community and National History Writing

The research for this paper formed part of the European Science Foundation project on Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe. Using data generated by the project, the article traces the emergence of professional academic women historians in twentieth-century European universities. It argues that the marginalisation of women historians in academia until the 1980s led women history graduates to develop research-based careers outside the university. In particular, the ambiguous attitude of academic historians towards popular history writing opened up a space for the woman author. The article analyses the careers and writings of five historians who pursued very successful careers as authors of popular history in England, France, Ireland and Scotland. They were among the first 'public' historians.

Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England

Women of letters writes a new history of English women's intellectual worlds using their private letters as evidence of hidden networks of creative exchange. The book argues that many women of this period engaged with a life of the mind and demonstrates the dynamic role letter-writing played in the development of ideas. Until now, it has been assumed that women's intellectual opportunities were curtailed by their confinement in the home. This book illuminates the household as a vibrant site of intellectual thought and expression. Amidst the catalogue of day-to-day news in women's letters are sections dedicated to the discussion of books, plays and ideas. Through these personal epistles, Women of letters offers a fresh interpretation of intellectual life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one that champions the ephemeral and the fleeting in order to rediscover women's lives and minds.