Chawton House Library Reading Group 2010-2011

The Library runs a reading group for the discussion of the work of women writers, 1600 to 1830,The group meets each month, September to May, on the third Monday of the month at 2pm. Afternoon tea is available during the Reading Group meetings for £2.50 per person.

This year we are going to read some of the novels-on-line texts which will be available in paperback and we will focus on the Gothic. The profits from the books published by Chawton House Library go towards new acquisitions to continue the development of the library’s collection. As 2011the bicentenary of the publication of Sense and Sensibility that has to be on the list!

Chawton House Library Reading Group Schedule 2010-2011

Monday 20 September 2010 Ashton Priory, Anonymous. Chawton House Library Books £15.00

Monday 18 October 2010 The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran. OUP USA; New edition edition £18.00 (A selection of poems from the book will be selected by Ruth Facer, a member of the group and an independent scholar.)

Monday 15 November 2010 The Castle of Tynemouth, Jane Harvey. Chawton House Library Books (price tbc.)

Monday 20 December 2010 The ‘Blazing World’ and other writings, Margaret Cavendish. Penguin £9.99

Monday 17 January 2011 The Princess of Cleves. An Historical Novel, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Verne La Fayette. Chawton House Library Books (price tbc.)

Monday 21 February and Monday 21 March 2011 Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah Cowley. £9.99 (We will discuss 2 plays from this book for each of these 2 sessions.)

Monday 18 April 2011 Cava of Toledo; or, the Gothic Princess, Augusta Amelia Stuart. Chawton House Library Books (price tbc.)

Monday 16 May 2011 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen. Penguin £3.99

Susannah Centlivre discussed on Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/04/2006_45_mon.shtml

Centlivre's The Wonder is April's book for the Chawton House Library reading group. It is a lively, fast-paced comedy and you will be able to read a review later.

Chawton House Library Images

Chawton House Library has a wealth of illustrations, and decorative frontispieces, hidden away between the pages of the books, as well as stunning collections of paintings and maps. All of the images used on this blog are from these and are copyright to Chawton House Library. They can be provided by application to the Library for other publications, contact library@chawton.net.

Millenium Hall by Sarah Scott

Millenium Hall is a book I have meant to read for years and when one of the Visiting Fellows at Chawton House Library likened the fellowships to having one's own 'Millenium Hall' - even down to the fruit and vegetables from the Walled Garden and the chickens (all the fellows at that point were women but it's not always so) . I knew it was time to read it and put it on the list for the reading group.

Sarah Scott creates a sanctuary for women at Millenium Hall and like Chawton House Library men are welcomed. Unlike Chawton House Library she seeks to reveal to men their abuses of women; Chawton House Library seeks to educate all equally about the neglected women writers of our literary history. The male narrator of Scott's novel provides a positive and engaging account of Millenium Hall as he and his companion, Lamont, discover it by accident on an excursion in the countryside. He describes it as an 'earthly paradise' and throughout the novel his glowing reports of the house and its inhabitants is interspersed with the stories of the women that live there.

The women at Millenium Hall have all suffered abuse by men: unhappy marriages, tyrannical husbands, attempted rape, the prejudice of fathers, illegitimacy and abandonment. Together they have created an idyllic female community and Scott's novel presents us with a utopian vision for another way of living other than the assumption that women must have their lives determined by men: husbands, or fathers and brothers if they fail to marry. Scott's women have not failed because they reject wedlock for themselves, instead they carve out fulfilling lives in a different and more independent way.

While utopian Scott's novel is not revolutionary; she does not seek to overturn the status quo - the women at Millenium Hall declare themselves in favour of marriage - which with the development of a Christian and philanthropic community, she in fact upholds conservative values. Her novel is semi-autobiographical, with her own experiences of an unhappy marriage, and a life-long deep female friendship, have been transformed into creating a vision of another way of living for those that wish to choose it.

Epistolary Literature

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time website makes available a programme from 2007 on epistolary fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00775dh

It includes references to writers in the collection at Chawton House Library, such as Aphra Behn and Frances Burney. As a genre, epistolary fiction, was a hugely popular and novels by both well- and lesser-known authors are held in the collection. Many of these novels also remain anonymous and Chawton House Library has about 280 of these.

Chawton House Library Reading Group

The next meeting of the group will be on Monday 18 January and we will be reading:

The History of Mary Prince: a West Indian Slave (1831) by Mary Prince. It can be purchased from the Chawton House Library online store http://www.chawtonhouse.org/shop/index.html.

The inclement weather meant that the Reading Group did not meet on Monday 21 December (we would have been snowed in at Chawton!) and I have promised the group members that we will discuss The Sylph by Georgiana Cavendish first and then move onto Mary Prince, so that no reading, or preparation for the session, will be wasted.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

The book in October for the reading group was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, first published in 1796. It was Wollstonecraft’s last book published during her lifetime and the most popular. The book consists of twenty-five letters written whilst Wollstonecraft travelled round Scandinavia with her baby daughter Fanny.

The letters are primarily a travelogue of the countries Wollstonecraft visits, describing the countries, the people and the beautiful landscapes. She also comments on the political problems, she witnessed. In Norway, in letter thirteen she describes how peasants are recruited into the army, and how unfair the system is that they are not allowed to choose whether they go into service at sea of for the army: ‘And what appears more tyrannical, the inhabitants of certain districts are appointed for the land, others for the sea service.’ Compared with her other travels in France and England, the old aristocracy in Norway and Sweden seemed harsher to her. For instance she saw how criminals are enslaved in Norway, and how the people of Christiana rose to protest the cost of grain: ‘They threw stones at Mr. Anker, the owner of it, as he rode out of town to escape their fury.’

However one of the main themes throughout the book is Wollstonecraft’s questioning of commerce in the countries, and she does not hide her dislike of it. She discusses the war economy that has developed in Scandinavia, creating an unjust taxation on the people involved in the conflict. Her conclusion results in poor commerce, as well as allowing more merchants to take advantage, of more people. She believes that commerce: ‘wears out the most sacred principle of humanity and rectitude.’ She compares the systems in Norway and Sweden to those in England and France, believing that commerce helped with revolution but the people there should be careful of relying to heavily on the system, otherwise it will turn back to the old ways of governing. And by the end of her travels she is particularly scathing: ‘men, indeed seem of the species of the fungus; and the insolent vulgarity which a sudden influx of wealth usually produces in common minds.’

The book is very emotional one, as well as political. Wollstonecraft initially took the trip for her lover Gilbert Imlay, to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for him (although this is never mentioned directly in the book itself) in hope that this would mend their fading relationship. Her feelings over Imlay are reflected in many of the letters, particularly towards the end of the book, when she perceives that Imlay is no longer committed to the relationship or their daughter. The letters do not mention Imlay specifically as they are all written in the first person, but whilst discussing her ideas on commerce, it can be seen that she attacking a specific person: ‘Ah! I shall whisper to you –that you—yourself are strangely altered since you have entered deeply into commerce.’ This is from letter twenty-three when she is in Hamburg, where Imlay was supposed to meet her but failed to, so her emotional state had worsened and this can be easily felt through her writing. A result of this is she leaves for London earlier than expected and so ends the book, giving it a slightly rushed and unfinished feeling to it, reflecting the author’s troubled emotional state.

Morwenna Roche