Harriet Guest – författare

Unbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society. This potential is important to the complex politics of Charlotte Smith's response, in her long poem The Emigrants, to the onset of war with France in 1793. The language of sentiment eases the transitions in Mary Robinson's writing between courtly praise for the French queen and liberal political opinion, and shapes her attitudes to the exchange between personal sociability and the expanding commercial market for her work. For women writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Elizabeth Inchbald the display of sentiment makes it possible to negotiate between the demands of commercial success and sociable or political allegiance. William Godwin admired Mary Wollstonecraft's capacity for an all-embracing sentiment of 'unbounded attachment' to humanity, and posthumous accounts such as Mary Hays's, as well as fictional heroines loosely based on Wollstonecraft's reputation, emphasised the strength of feeling, the enthusiasm, which united her private character and her politics, and evoked powerful responses from both her immediate social circle and her readers. The success of Jane Austen's novels depended on the access they gave readers to the privacy of her heroines' minds, where their sensibility apprehends an underlying coherence in the apparently disjointed social worlds in which they lived.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educatedwomen and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects.Small Change considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.

The artist William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific in 1772-5. His extraordinarily vivid images, read against the fascinating journals of Cook and his companions, reveal as much about European cultures and historiography as about the peoples they visited. In this lively and original book, Harriet Guest discusses Hodges's dramatic landscapes and portraits alongside written accounts of the voyages and in the context of the theories of civilisation which shaped European perceptions - theories drawn from the works of philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment such as Adam Smith and John Millar. She argues that the voyagers resorted to diverse or incompatible models of progress in successive encounters with different groups of islanders, and shows how these models also structured metropolitan views of the voyagers and of Hodges's work. This fully illustrated study offers a fresh perspective on eighteenth-century representations of gender, colonialism and exploration.