Abstract
Writing to Samuel Crisp as she made final revisions to the ill-fated Witlings (1778–80), Frances Burney strikingly aligned her literary labours with the commonly degraded employments undertaken by labouring-class women. Angered by Crisp’s suggestions that her newfound literary fame had plunged her into an unproductive round of ‘incessant and uncommon engagements’, Burney asserted the labour-intensity of both her domestic and professional employments:
Caps, hats, and ribbons make, indeed no venerable appearance upon paper; — no more do eating and drinking; — yet the one can no more be worn without being made, than the other can be swallowed without being cooked; and those who can neither pay milliners, nor keep scullions, must either toil for themselves, or go capless and dinnerless.1
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Notes
Frances Burney to Samuel Crisp, 22 January 1780, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1842–46), I, pp. 300–1.
Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 191.
Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989);
Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early Career of Frances Burney’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14 (2002), 345–70.
Letter to Charles Burney, 13 August 1779. Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor, Lars E. Troide, Stewart Cooke and Victoria Kortes-Papp (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 128.
Frances Burney, The Witlings(1778–80), ed. Clayton J. Delery (East Lansing, MI: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1995), p. 66.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Oliver Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 127.
Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 188.
Jacqueline M. Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of Poetry’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1994), 68.
Clara Reeve’s School for Widows, ed. Jeanine M. Casler (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003), p. 66.
Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 83.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 111–43.
Sarah Scott, The History of Cornelia (1750), with an introduction by Caroline Franklin (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1992), p. 5.
Gary Kelly, ‘Bluestocking Feminism’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 171.
Gary Kelly, in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), V, pp. 72–3.
Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 2 vols (London: A. Millar, 1759)
Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Making Good Use of History: Sarah Robinson Scott in the Republic of Letters’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003), 47.
April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 113.
Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995), p. 113.
Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationship Among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), esp. pp. 295–319.
Dorice Williams Elliott, The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002), p. 35.
Mary Peace, ‘“Epicures in Rural Pleasures”: Revolution, Desire and Sentimental Economy in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall’, Women’s Writing, 9: 2 (2002), 305–16.
Penelope Aubin, ‘Impious Pietist, Humourist or Purveyor of Juvenile Fantasy?’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26: 1 (2003), 55–75.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded(1740), ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.
Sarah Scott, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), ed. Betty Rizzo (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 47.
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 210–27.
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© 2005 Jennie Batchelor
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Batchelor, J. (2005). Woman’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sarah Scott. In: Batchelor, J., Kaplan, C. (eds) British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_2
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