Women Essayists and the Formation of Public Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The nineteenth century gave women writers new ways to enter public intellectual life. They did not always enter it through Parliament, universities, pulpits, learned societies, or official institutions, because many of those spaces remained closed to them. Instead, they entered through print. Essays, reviews, letters, lectures, memoirs, conduct books, travel writing, social criticism, and periodical articles became important forms through which women could speak to a public audience. The woman essayist was therefore not only a literary figure. She was also a thinker, observer, moral critic, and participant in public debate.