Abstract
While work in sensibilities is wide-ranging, it has yet to include the genres of the diary or spiritual autobiography. This is not surprising considering how very few diaries have been published or digitized. My work is drawn from ninety-nine British women’s diaries penned between 1668 and 1838 which I photographed during a 2021 research trip to the British Library, the Bodleian, and the National Library of Scotland. I focus my study on how women expressed their sensibility (i.e. feminine behaviors that were socially expected) and their thoughts about sensibility: especially those nonconformist women who sought to use sensibility subversively as a means of pointing to their power. I focus this essay on Scottish nonconformist Katharine Ross. Diaries allow us to investigate: how women wrote privately; how women wrote in networks, sharing and circulating entries; how women wrote apparently private entries which were in fact intended to be discovered by family and close friends; collaborations in commonplace books; a rare look at otherwise unknown women writers; a rarer opportunity to read first hand testimony from lower-class women. This essay investigates how women wrote about sensibility, either as a locus of potential power or as merely the way society expected them to behave. In including firsthand testimony offered within autobiographies, this work operates as a feminist recovery project, illuminating formerly hidden aspects of women’s cultural history. The project also considers the afterlives of the genre and builds another means through which we can track the history that has led to modern feminism.
Presenters
Heather Heckman Mc KennaInstructor, English and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Missouri, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Fragile Meanings: Vulnerability in the Study of Religions and Spirituality
KEYWORDS
Eighteenth-Century, Literature, Diaries, Spiritual Autobiographies, Women's Studies
