Book Description

Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British - French Connection, 1770-1820 engages in recent discussions of the development of British nationalism during the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Leanne Maunu argues that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Discussing texts by Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Maunu demonstrates that women writers of this period imagined themselves as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community.