Politics of Writing: The Politics of Writing:Julia Kavanagh, 1824-77 Paratexts and Contexts »

Eileen Fauset was formerly a Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds, Bretton Hall Campus and has published extensively on Irish and British women’s writing.

Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically engaged study Eileen Fauset sees Kavanagh as a significant, but neglected, writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing.

With few known primary sources to go on the author manages, through her skilful selection of letters, official documents and historical commentary, to piece together some of the jigsaw of Kavanagh's life. Throughout this study, the biographical element informs and directs discussion of Kavanagh's writing itself. What emerges is a succinct and telling portrait of a woman who, through a desire to write, acquired both economic independence and a means through which she could voice her sexual politics. Eileen Fauset challenges the historical attitudes to "popular romance," a genre read mainly by women and generally discounted as simple entertainment. She argues that in Kavanagh's novels romance is often the pivot around which issues of cultural and sexual difference are examined, a perspective that, invariably, also informed Kavanagh's non-fiction.

This study addresses the current enthusiasm for the reclamation of neglected women writers and also brings to light interesting material that might otherwise have remained unknown to the specialist. It will appeal to academics, students and enthusiasts of Victorian literature and women's writing.

Preface and acknowledgements ix

1 Julia Kavanagh 1

Progress as a writer 4

Kavanagh's physical health and appearance 8

Family and background 10

Gavan Duffy 16

Morgan Kavanagh 19

Julia Kavanagh and Charlotte Brontëet; 32

The politics of writing 37

2 The novel 42

Women novelists and separate spheres 42

Voicing sexual politics 47

Nathalie (1850) and Adèle (1858) 50

Daisy Burns (1853) 57

The dual self 56

Sybil's Second Love (1867) 65

Fiction, romance and fantasy: Grace Lee (1855) 72

The social novel: Rachel Gray (1856) 89

3 Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century 98

Introduction 98

Elisabeth Charlotte ('Madame') and Madame de Berri 106

Madame du Maine 108

Mademoiselle de Launay 112

The intrigue of romance: Mademoiselle de Launay, Mademoiselle Aïet;ssé and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 114

Madame du Ch&ahat;telet 124

Madame d'Epinay 128

The bureaux d'esprits 128

Madame de Genlis 130

Louis XV's mistresses: Madame de Ch&ahat;teauroux, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame du Barry 133

Marie Antoinette 137

Madame Roland 140

4 French Women of Letters and English Women of Letters 145

French Women of Letters 149

Breaking through the boundaries: French women novelists and cultural change 150

Mademoiselle de Scudéry 153

Madame de La Fayette 160

Madame de Staëet;l 163

English Women of Letters 171

Aphra Behn 172

Not such 'silly young creatures' 176

Sarah Fielding 178

Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) 178

Charlotte Smith 181

Ann Radcliffe 185

Elizabeth Inchbald 191

Maria Edgeworth 195

Jane Austen 199

Amelia Opie 201

Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan 204

5 A Summer andWinter in the Two Sicilies 210

Postscript 225

Notes 226

Julia Kavanagh: publications 271

Select bibliography 276

Index 00