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Description
This study interprets the epistolary space of Sarah Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft. The argument presented here, that both of these women created distinctive epistolary spaces where they were able to give themselves permission to step outside the gender norms and confines of their place and time, attempts to demonstrate a combined women's history and gender history approach. The study has three primary goals in using this combined approach. First, to correct the simplified misreading of eighteenth-century women's writing that has prevailed to this day, specifically in the case of both Sarah Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft's epistolary careers. Second, to evaluate how each woman individually used their writing to step outside prescribed gender roles and challenge parameters of feminine modes of expression. Finally, to understand them not as monumental historical figures but instead as emblems of a multitude of women who wrote, questioned, and expressed themselves in ways that reflected shifting cultural notions at the end of the eighteenth century. In order to understand the two women studied here, the realities in women's lives and bodies that create experiential similarities has been explored because they may be the very things that prompted these women to exercise autonomy. Simultaneously, the difference in class between Sarah Lennox and Mary Wollstonecraft has also to be explored fully in order to understand the immense gap between these two women's life experiences. This strategy acknowledges the impossibility of trying to find a universal women's history or experience, as that would eliminate the dynamic multiple identities that each woman possesses. This study does not attempt to limit the multi-faceted personalities or accomplishments of these women, but instead to highlight and explore them.
