Seminar of the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English
Timothy Whelan (Georgia Southern University), ‘Mary Hays, William Godwin, and the Dissenting Tradition of Women’s Correspondence’
12.45-1.45pm, 22 March, Queen Mary University of London (Mile End campus), ArtsTwo 2.18
This paper presents a tradition of eighteenth-century Dissenting women who engaged in private (and sometimes public) correspondence with ministers, a tradition beginning with published letters by Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737) and Anne Dutton (1692-1765) that was followed by some lesser known unpublished correspondences between the Baptist poet Mary Steele (1753-1813) and Caleb Evans of Bristol and Steele's poet-friend, the Unitarian Mary Scott (1751-1793) and Theophilus Lindsey, both correspondences occurring in the 1780s. A more celebrated public exchange occurred in London between 1787 and 1791 involving Maria de Fleury and the controversial Antinomian minister William Huntington. These letter exchanges are mirrored by a correspondence between Mary Hays (1759-1843) and the Baptist minister Robert Robinson in the 1780s and her public exchange with Gilbert Wakefield in 1791 (her letter was signed 'Eusebius') and her now celebrated correspondence with William Godwin in 1795-96. This tradition among Dissenting women has received little, if any, scholarly attention, especially in relation to Hays, whose exchange with Godwin emerges less an anomaly and more as an established mode of intellectual exchange between women and ministers within the religious and literary culture of Dissent, providing a perspective on the relationship between Hays and Godwin not previously examined.
All are welcome without prior registration.
www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/home/lunchtime-work-in-progress-seminar/
James Vigus, [log in to unmask]
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