“The Original Journals of ‘Kitty’ Wilmot”: manufacturing women’s travel writing in the salon of Helen Maria Williams

This article discusses the implications of a previously unknown Romantic-period manuscript by Anglo-Irish traveler Katherine Wilmot (1773–1824). A later version of Wilmot’s epistolary travelogue of 1801–03 has been valued as an artifact of British experience abroad during the Peace of Amiens for its descriptions of Napoleonic Paris. Yet the newly discovered draft reveals a deeper assimilation within and sympathy towards the radical political and literary networks Wilmot documented, as well as a budding relationship with author and salonnière Helen Maria Williams that is occluded from the later narrative. This article examines the complex choices surrounding authorship for British women abroad in the period by considering a refused invitation that Wilmot submit writing to The English Press, the publishing venture of Williams and her companion John Hurford Stone. The article details Wilmot’s evolving writing in terms of Williams’s influence, outlining how British women travel writers reshaped their experiences to meet the expectations of readers at home while also considering the impact of sedition, gendered agency, and political affinity on the production and reception of their writing

More than a woman: early memoirs of british actresses

Las primeras décadas del siglo XVIII fueron testigos del auge de la novela, que frecuentemente tenía como tema la defensa de la castidad de la mujer. En contraste, las primeras biografías de las actrices de la restauración y del siglo XVIII no fueron simplemente advertencias morales que castigaban a las actrices por un comportamiento disoluto, sino que en su lugar ofrecían entretenidas descripciones de aventuras de mujeres que se las arreglaban para alinear alguna semblanza de “virtud” con costumbres sexuales transgresoras y orígenes familiares humildes. Me centraré en la vida de tres célebres actrices: Nell Gwyn, Lavinia Fenton y Anne Oldfield para mostrar cómo una generación de actrices inglesas ha sido conmemorada, y cómo su virtud —o falta de ella— se podía mantener notablemente diferenciada de sus historias sexuales.The early decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of fiction that frequently took women’s defence of chastity as its subject. In contrast, the first biographies of Restoration and eighteenth-century actresses were not simply moral warnings that chastised women players for loose behavior, but instead offered entertaining accounts of female adventurers who managed to align some semblance of “virtue” with transgressive sexual mores and lowly family origins. I focus on the lives of three celebrated actresses, Nell Gwyn, Lavinia Fenton, and Anne Oldfield to show how a generation of English actresses was memorialized, and how their virtue —or lack of it— could be kept remarkably distinct from their sexual histories

The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750

“Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us”—Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748). In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed “every opprobrious term” to chastise women. In The Brink of All We Hate, Felicity Nussbaum documents and groups those opprobrious terms in order to identify the conventions of the satires, to demonstrate how those conventions create a myth, to provide critical readings of poetic texts in the antifeminist tradition, and to draw some conclusions about the basic nature of satire. Nussbaum finds that the English tradition of antifeminist satire draws on a background that includes Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal, as well as the more modern French tradition of La Bruyere and Boileau and the late seventeenth-century English pamphlets by Gould, Fige, and Ames. The tradition was employed by the major figures of the golden age of satire—Samuel Butler, Dryden, Swift, Addison, and Pope. Examining the elements of the tradition of antifeminist satire and exploring its uses, from the most routine to the most artful, by the various poets, Nussbaum reveals a clearer context in which many poems of the Restoration and eighteenth century will be read anew. Felicity Nussbaum is professor of English at Syracuse University and has edited Three Seventeenth-Century Satires, The Plays of David Mallet, and An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Critical Studies of Women and Literature, 1660-1800. Will appeal to Restoration and eighteenth-century scholars and to women\u27s studies faculty. . . . It will be the book on the subject for some time to come. —Shirley Strum Kennyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1047/thumbnail.jp

Rival Queens : Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater /

Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Electronic reproduction.Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.Felicity Nussbaum is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of numerous books, including The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher’s Web site, viewed October 27 2015

Does a simulated upland grassland community respond to increasing background, peak or accumulated exposure of ozone?

Tropospheric ozone concentrations are increasing, which may result in elevated background concentrations at rural high-altitude sites. In this study simulated upland grassland communities containing seven species were exposed to ozone treatments in solardomes for 12 weeks in each of two consecutive summers. Ozone profiles, based on future ozone predictions, were of elevated background concentrations, episodic peaks of ozone and a combination of the two. During the winter between the two exposures the communities were kept outdoors in ambient air. Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that peaks of ozone cause detrimental effects to vegetation, this study shows that for simulated grassland communities an increase in background ozone concentration in the absence of peaks of ozone also corresponded with increased senescence. In many cases senescence was further increased when peaks of ozone were also present. The species used showed no acclimation to ozone and the same relationship between senescence and ozone dose occurred in both years of the study. A decrease in cumulative biomass was demonstrated for Anthoxanthum odoratum, which contributed to a decrease in total community biomass and grass:forb ratio. These results indicate that current and future ozone concentrations could cause detrimental effects on growth and vitality of natural grassland communities and that for some species the consequences of increased background ozone concentration are as severe as that of increased peaks

How much does the presence of a competitor modify the within-canopy distribution of ozone-induced senescence and visible injury?

Many natural vegetation species have been shown to be negatively affected by ozone. This study has investigated how the presence of competing species in a community affects two common responses to ozone: visible injury and senescence. Monocultures and mixtures of Trifolium repens and Lolium perenne were grown in large containers and were exposed in solardomes to either a rural episodic ozone profile (AOT40 of 12.86 ppm h) or control conditions (AOT40 of 0.02 ppm h) for 12 weeks. The proportion of ozone-injured or senesced leaves was different in the different regions of the canopy. The highest proportions of injured/senesced leaves were in the plant material growing at the edge of the canopy and the upper canopy, with a significantly lower proportion of injured leaves in the inner canopy. The presence of L. perenne increased the proportion of ozone-injured leaves in T. repens at the final harvest, whilst the presence of T. repens decreased the proportion of senesced leaves in L. perenne. In L. perenne, the proportion of injured leaves at the edge and inner canopy decreased significantly when grown in competition, whilst for T. repens the reverse effect occurred in the inner canopy only. Different mechanisms appeared to influence the interaction between response to ozone and competitors in these two species. In L. perenne the response to ozone may have been related to nitrogen supply, whereas in T. repens canopy structure was more important