‘A Sleeping
Nymph Watchedby a Shepherd’,by Angelica
Kauffman(1780)

Women and Romanticism
Felicity James, fj21@le.ac.uk
University of Leicester, UK

What is Romanticism?
‘Does *Romanticism+ have, or can we giveit, a satisfactory definition? After nearly two
centuries, of course, we have acquired asense for the people and ideas that should
be subsumed under it, but they are somany and various that it seems hopeless tosearch for a single universal feature’
Michael Ferber, Romanticism: A Very ShortIntroduction, pp. 7-8.

Who were the Romantics?
• The Big Five/Six?
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, George Gordon (Lord)
Byron• Where are the women?
‘By the 1960s, five male poets constituted the Romanticcanon. The women of that period were so effectively ‘notthere’, except as sisters, wives and mothers, that they wereexcluded from consideration even as ‘minor’ writers’ *...+
the history of women’s writing in the early nineteenth
century was an issue separate from Romanticism’ (Paula R.
Feldman and Theresa Kelley, Romantic Women Writers:
Voices and Countervoices’)‘By the 1790s in Great Britain, there were many more
women than men novelists, and the theatre wasactually dominated by women [...] In the arena ofpoetry, the place of women was likewise, for a time,
predominant, and it is here that the distortions of ourreceived history are most glaring. Its chronology has
been written along wholly, and arbitrarily, amasculine gender line’. Stuart Curran, ‘The ‘I’Altered’, Romanticism and Feminism (1988) ed. Ann
Mellor.
‘What has transpired in this short space (1988-1999)
is no less than a wholesale rethinking of British
Romanticism, both as an intellectual and cultural
phenomenon, and as a site of literary production’.
Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen Behrendt,
Romanticism and Women Poets (1999)

Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin), 1743-1825

Anna Letitia
Barbauld

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain: portraits in the characters of theMuses in the Temple of Apollo
by Richard Samuel, 1778

‘The Mouse’s Petition’"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos."(Virgil, Aeneid, Book 6, lines 852-853)"You remember to guide the peoples with power, Roman,(these will be your arts), to impose the way of peace, tospare the conquered and to battle down the proud."‘The Mouse’s Petition’
OH ! hear a pensive captive's prayer,
For liberty that sighs;
And never let thine heart be shut
Against the prisoner's cries.
For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate ;And tremble at th' approaching morn,
Which brings impending fate.
If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,And spurn'd a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.

‘The Mouse’s Petition’
The well taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,And feels for all that lives.
If mind, as ancient sages taught,
A never dying flame,
Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms,
In every form the same,
Beware, lest in the worm you crush
A brother's soul you find ;And tremble lest thy luckless hand
Dislodge a kindred mind.

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air-Pump, Joseph Wrightof Derby, 1768.

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air-Pump, Joseph Wrightof Derby, 1768 (detail).

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797
John Opie, portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (1797)© National Portrait Gallery, London

Women, I allow, may have different duties tofulfil, but they are human duties, and theprinciples that should regulate the discharge ofthem, I sturdily maintain, must be the same
Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Vindication of the Rightsof Men (1790)‘the birthright of man[...] is such a degree ofliberty, civil andreligious, as iscompatible with theliberty of every otherindividual’Vindication of the Rightsof Woman (1792)‘It is time to effect arevolution in femalemanners’‘Boys love sports of noise and activity ; to beat the drum, to whip the top, and to
drag about their little carts: girls, on the other hand, are fonder of things of show
and ornament, such as mirrours, trinkets, and dolls: the doll is the peculiar
amusement of the females, from whence we see their taste plainly adapted totheir destination’, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762)‘I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy thanJ. J. Rousseau-I can recollect my own feelings, and I have looked steadily aroundme; yet, so far from coinciding with him in opinion respecting the first dawn of thefemale character, I will venture to affirm, that a girl, whose spirits have not been
damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp,
and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her noalternative. Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if thedistinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes anydifference.-I will go further, and affirm, as an indisputable fact, that most of thewomen, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, orshewn any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild-as someof the elegant formers of the fair sex would insinuate’ (Wollstonecraft, Vindication,1792)‘ Let it be observed, that in your sex manly exercises are never graceful; that inthem a tone and figure, as well as an air and deportment, of the masculine kind, arealways forbidding; and that men of sensibility desire in every woman softfeatures, and a flowing voice, a form, not robust, and demeanour delicate andgentle.'
James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (1765)
Is not the following portrait—the portrait of a house slave? […] Such a woman
ought to be an angel-or she is an ass-for I discern not a trace of the humancharacter, neither reason nor passion in this domestic drudge, whose being isabsorbed in that of a tyrant's. (Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792))

Love life
• 1790? Affair with the painter Henry Fuseli• 1793 Goes to France and meets the American,
Captain Gilbert Imlay• May 1794 Imlay’s daughter, Fanny, born
• May 1795 first attempt at suicide• November 1795 second suicide attemptLove life
• Summer 1796 begins relationship withGodwin• December 1796 discovers she is pregnant• March 1797 marries Godwin

We did not marry *…+ nothing canbe so ridiculous upon the face ofit, or so contrary to the genuine
march of sentiment, as to require
the overflowing of the soul to waitupon a ceremony *…+ Mary felt anentire conviction of the proprietyof her conduct.
from William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of aVindication of the Rights of Woman (London:Johnson, 1798) [this passage is from the 1st edition]

Death and Memoirs• 30 August 1797 Mary
(will be Mary Shelley)born• 10 Sept Wollstonecraft
dies of puerperal fever• 1798 Godwin publishes
Memoirs and Maria, or
the Wrongs of Woman

Anti-Jacobin Review, 1798

Mary Shelley, née Wollstonecraft Godwin(1797-1851)
Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell, shown at the Royal Academy exhibition (1840).

1910 version ofFrankenstein; 1931 versionof Frankensteinhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOcJwt8XB4M

TO
WILLIAM GODWIN,

POLITICAL JUSTICE,CALEB WILLIAMS, &C.

AUTHOR OF

THESE VOLUMES
Are respectfully inscribed
BY
THE AUTHORFirst edition ofFrankenstein (1818) anddedicatory page

John Opie, portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (1797)Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Mary and Percy used to meet at
Wollstonecraft’s tomb in St Pancras church:‘That churchyard with it*s+ sacred tomb,’
Mary would write later in her journal, ‘wasthe spot where first love shone in you[r] deareyes’ (Journals, II: 479)

from Volume I, ch. 4, Frankenstein (1818)“I traversed the streets, without any clear conception ofwhere I was, or what I was doing. My heart palpitated inthesickness of fear; and I hurried on with irregular steps,
not daring to look about me:

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,And, having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pkAiQctFos&feature=related