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Exemplary women

From "Women's writing"
The idea of discussing women's cultural contributions in a separate category has a long history. Lists of exemplary women can be found as far back as the eighth century B.C., when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361-1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). British writers, as in so many other instances, embraced the classical models and made them their own. Some of the British catalogues were moral in tone but others focused on accomplishments rather than virtues alone. There are many examples in the eighteenth century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), John Duncombe's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers, and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. And as long as there has been this laudatory trend there has been a counter-trend of misogynist writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the eighteenth century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle.

Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the eighteenth century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers. And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.

The " exemplary women" tradition

 * Hesiod, Catalogue of Women (attr.)
 * Plutarch, in Moralia
 * Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361-1375)
 * Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)
 * Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of hooly wummen (c.1430)
 * George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752.
 * John Duncombe, Feminead (1754)
 * Anon., Biographium faemineum : the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. London: Printed for S. Crowder, 1766. 2 vols.
 * Mary Scott, The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead. London: Joseph Johnson, 1774.
 * Elizabeth Benger, The Female Geniad (1791)
 * Mary Hays, Female Biography (6 vols., 1803)
 * Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman's Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished women from the Creation to AD 1850 (1854)
 * Charlotte Mary Yonge, Biographies of Good Women (First Series, 1862; Second Series, 1865)
 * Julia Kavanagh, Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850), Women of Christianity (1852), French Women of Letters (1862) and English Women of Letters (1862). These collective biographies "all argue against idealized, sentimental portrayals of female experience. She intended these biographies to provide a corrective to the silence of male historians on the topic of female influence in a variety of sphere beyond the domestic" (ODNB).
 * Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches. Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1893.
 * "These sketches originally appeared as a series in the 'Lady's pictorial'... They are now revised, enlarged and brought up to date." Sketches of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. L. B. Walford, Rhoda Broughton, John Strange Winter (Mrs. Arthur Stannard), [[Mrs. Alexander, Helen Mathers, Florence Marryat, Mrs. Lovett Cameron, Mrs. Hungerford, Matilda Betham Edwards, Edna Lyall, Rosa Nouchette Carey, Adeline Sergeant, Mrs. Edward Kennard, Jessie Fothergill, Lady Duffus Hardy, Iza Duffus Hardy, May Crommelin, Mrs. Houstoun, Mrs. Alex. Fraser, Honourable Mrs. Henry Chetwynd, Jean Middlemass, Augusta De Grasse Stevens, Mrs. Leith Adams, Jean Ingelow.

Resources

 * Booth, Alison, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (ref). See also Collective Biographies of Women: a bibliography, with annotations (website)
 * Sanok, Catherine, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England. U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. (ref)

NEW
The Female Geniad;

A Poem.

Inscribed To Mrs. Crespigny. By Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger, Of Portsmouth; Written at the Age of Thirteen. London: Printed for T. Hookham and J. Carpenter, No 147, New, and 15, Old Bond-Street; and C. and G. Kearsley, No 46, Fleet-Street. 1791. http://textbase.wwp.brown.edu/WWO/php/wAll.php?doc=benger.geniad.html

Jane West wrote a series of poems in praise of women writers (Lonsdale 379)

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Women%20%2d%2d%20Early%20works%20to%201800

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/rest/1993/00000007/00000003/art00004

Specimens of British Poetesses: Selected and Chronologically Arranged By Alexander Dyce http://books.google.com/books?id=jkwaNDbGSHUC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=elizabeth+thomas+corinna&source=web&ots=rEOQwl9Ojy&sig=APw5EJhYP3Dx3FyycTYDiHhSOSw#PPP1,M1 Published 1825 T. Rodd 446 pages Original from Harvard University

Ballard was serialized in the Newcastle General Magazine and The Monthly Review; anywhere else?