'The True State of My Case: The Memoirs of Mrs Anne Bailey, 1771

This article explores The Memoirs of Mrs Anne Bailey, a short memoir published by a lone mother in London in 1771. It addresses questions of methodology, in terms of legal history and textual analysis, to examine how Anne Bailey's Memoirs shed light on the operation of everyday justice in the mid-eighteenth century metropolis, as well as what they reveal about relationships between legal and textual subjectivities during the era. The article argues that drawing on life-writing sources enriches our understanding of the lived experience of lowlevel justice, as well as conceptions of individual personhood in the eighteenth century

Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Tensions of Empire during the Modernist Period

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf shared a personal and professional relationship which both recognised as being central to the development of their writing. Their relationship was strongly influenced not only by the many life experiences which they shared, and the similarity of their artistic projects, but also by their different positions in terms of empire. This essay examines the Mansfield/Woolf relationship within the context of the broader imperial relationship during the modernist period, and offers new approaches to considering both writers within modernist literary history

What men ought to be : masculinities in Jane Austen\u27s novels

“ ‘What men ought to be’: Masculinities in Jane Austen’s Novels” examines Jane Austen’s literary constructions of men and masculinity as feminine and feminist contributions to the public debate on ideal English masculinity throughout the Romantic period. It explores the problematic position of women writers in critiquing masculinity in the highly politicised context of the Romantic period and develops a theoretical approach to interpreting their constructions of desirable and undesirable masculinities as being representative of their social, cultural and feminist concerns. Throughout her novels, Jane Austen’s representations of the desirable male – of ‘what men ought to be’ – are informed by her fundamental concerns regarding the realisation of female selfhood and the fulfilment of women’s desires, and the political survival and moral wellbeing of the English nation. This thesis argues that Austen’s novels seek to reform socially-approved codes of gentry masculinity by endorsing a model of male identity that is not dependent on the submission or passivity of women in courtship or domestic relationships, promoted by conventional patriarchal ideologies. Austen’s novel’s dramatise the process by which men can choose to forge a masculine identity that allows women a greater socially and publicly participatory role, both enabling the fulfilment of female desire and ensuring the security and wellbeing of the English nation