User:Christopher6/sandbox

NOTE TO PROFESSOR OZMENT

Howdy there! The following is a much, much, MUCH more truncated version of what I had written a few days ago. After reviewing other reception history and legacy sections, I realized mine was pretty long, and although it was still generic and not too detailed (relatively), I still felt like there was way more in it than there should be. So I decided to remove a lot of it (maybe even more than half), and leave what I thought was important enough to be regarded as a "legacy": what things she's remembered for, what people say about them, and things named in her honor.

There's a lot more I want (read: plan) to add after this class is over, but I'll probably be doing that in the biography section, which 1. I don't want to bother you with reading right at this moment, and 2. I feel I have so much information on that I might have to break it down into subsections...

Anyway, I'm not sure if I just got lucky and got a kickass writer, or if it just feels that way because I've become so invested in her life, but I hope this unjustly short section of a wikipedia article is something of a good start to getting Frances Brooke the attention she deserves.

Legacy
Brooke is widely regarded by literary historians and critics as being the first Canadian novelist after writing her 1769 work The History of Emily Montague . Her literary critical reception is based mostly on this publication, and has been popular among scholars after its recovery, with more than a dozen scholarly articles written on its subject matter as of 2004, as well as seeing modern paperback reprints including a definitive scholarly edition. Critics of Brooke have studied themes present in Emily Montague, such as applying free-trade imperialism to eighteenth century Canada, proto-feminism , and displacing the French Catholic threat in British Columbian colonies.

While the purpose and material of Emily Montague is often the subject of debate between critics, it's reception as a work unto itself is largely neutral to negative. Contemporarily, critics such as Dermot Mccarthy write that "Brooke's inability to imagine her ambivalence... is understandable given her time and background... However, her failure should not be endorsed." Desmond Pacey, in his book Essays in Canadian Criticism, writes that "[Emily Montague] 's artistic shortcomings are obvious: the plot is thin, conventional, repetitive, and poorly integrated with the informative sections of the book; the style is generally stilted and monotonous; the characters, with one or two exceptions, are traditional in conception and deficient in life; the whole performance is heavily didactic and sentimental." Juliet McMaster cites Emily Montague as a source of inspiration and parody for Jane Austen's story Love and Freindship, but states that overall, "Emily Montague is no mean literary achievement." Even in its own time, the novel was divisive in its value. The Monthly Review, in its September 1769 issue, wrote "[the novel's] frost pieces... decorate a short story which has nothing extraordinary in it.” It is also of important note that while Brooke is contemporarily popularized as a Candian novelist, Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia's entry on Brookes states "Brooke's work was based on English models and had no perceptible effect on Canadian literature."

Other works by Brooke, such as her 1777 novel The Excursion have received some scholarly receptions for their pastoral traditions as well as their political satire against the English theatre industry of the eighteenth century, while some of her works such as her 1981 play The Siege of Sinopoe have close to no reception. Brooke's personal life is the subject of a number of scholarly journals, mostly relating to her relationships with actors David Garrick and Mary Ann Yates. Brooke herself has been the subject of her own monograph, and in recent years has gained popularity as the "destroyer of English (not literally)" due to an online article published by the University of Pennsylvania, which regards Brooke as being used in the earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation of the hyperbolic use of the word "literally" to mean "figuratively".

In 1985, the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature approved 337 names to be assigned to features on the surface of Venus, and honored Brooke by naming a crater after her.