Criss-Crossing the Channel: Women’s Educational Discourse in Britain and France, 1750-1820

Abstract

Women’s writing and education in the eighteenth century have received extensive critical attention in recent decades, particularly in Anglo-American literature and criticism, but also increasingly in Europe. Indeed, it can be argued that the field of women’s literary studies in the period is now moving beyond recovery, and into territory that raises new questions. Placing itself at the moving edge of this field by interrogating new and recovered material, this thesis addresses a gap in the current body of academic work on women’s educational literary output, exploring the connections and discourses between women writers of the period in the context of cross-Channel exchange and migration (whether books, ideas, language, or people). While current scholarship has made the case for women-led and women-centred educational debates, in this thesis I claim that these discourses are influenced – implicitly and explicitly – by the cross-Channel dialogue between such women. Structured by way of a series of case studies of British and French authors and works, I demonstrate the active and serious engagement of these women with both domestic and foreign instructive publications. Often used as a foil to contrast differing national attitudes to education, particularly in the tumultuous political context at the turn of the century, these women were able to use reception and translation as effective tools to influence the direction of the education debate.
The corpus for this thesis – pedagogical non-fiction, periodical publications, moral tales, and personal manuscripts – deliberately places my arguments outside of the more common academic engagement with novels. I consider women’s pedagogical productions under four headings: texts for educators, texts for educatees (explicitly not always children), private educational writing, and women’s involvement in periodical publication networks. An examination of contemporary reception, both at home and abroad, underpins the thesis argument. Made possible precisely because of the foreign nature of the target texts, I use close readings of translated educational work, especially that of Maria Edgeworth, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, and Louise d’Épinay, to demonstrate how women’s engagement with a cross-Channel publishing industry provides them with the means to address, alter, and adjust the output of their contemporaries to fit within national or gendered discourses. I also explore the creation of an international discourse resulting directly from such cross-Channel engagement. In my consideration of manuscript material in particular, I claim that women’s engagement with cross-Channel debates on pedagogy is as intensive as it is extensive, that documentary evidence reveals a considered response to pertinent foreign publications as much as it does a wide-ranging yet cursory one.

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