John Duncombe (1729-1786) published his "canon-forming" celebration of British women writers as ''The Feminiad'' in 1754, though the title was revised as ''The Feminead'' in the second, 1757 edition.

The argument

The piece is an essay in verse, a form popular in the eighteenth century, consisting of 380 lines of

heroic couplets A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the ''Legend of ...

. Duncombe argues that women "shine, / In mind and person equally divine" and urges his readers to resist the "undisputed reign" of "Prejudice" and instead "sing the glories of a sister-choir." He appeals to his readers' sense of nationalism by contrasting "free-born" "British nymphs" to a stereotypical image of women in a "Seraglio," and situates his subjects in a cultural lineage stemming from classical Greece and Rome. Duncombe takes care to clarify that his support of women artists only extends to those who continue to fulfill their assigned feminine roles and suggests that the pursuit of art and culture might keep women away from more frivolous pursuits: Duncombe makes a selective survey of British women writers. He quickly passes over the racier writers of the previous age such as Behn, Centlivre, and Manley, as well as memoirists Phillips,

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, and

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— part of "a pattern of contradictory inscription and subordination of women writers that recurs throughout eighteenth-century and Romantic formulations of literary tradition" — to catalogue the moral and artistic virtues of writers still, in most cases, living. Many of the writers mentioned were connected to the

Blue Stockings Society The Blue Stockings Society, an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century, emphasised education and mutual cooperation. Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and others founded it in the early 1750s as a li ...

, an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century. Duncombe does not address the subject of writing as a paid profession, but frames it as an avocation. ''The Feminead'' ends on a strategic note, with the argument that women who are encouraged to learn and create make better wives and mothers. Such appeals to the presumed self-interests of the reader were not uncommon in early pro-feminist texts.

Context

Duncombe's poem was popular and well-received but not unique; it is one of "multiple attempts to promote and anthologize women writers as important members of the national literary tradition,"Kucich, Greg. “Gendering the Canons of Romanticism: Past and Present.” ''The Wordsworth Circle'', vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 95–102. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24042631. Accessed 24 Jun. 2022. part of what scholar Moira Ferguson calls an "eruption of female panegyrics," mainly by men, that includes George Ballard's ''Memoirs of British Ladies'' (biographies of sixty-five notable women; 1752); Theophilus Cibber's ''Lives of the Poets'' (1753); George Colman and

Bonnell Thornton Bonnell Thornton (1725–1768) was an English poet, essayist, and critic. He was educated at Westminster School, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1747. In 1752 Thornton founded the ''Drury Lane Journal'', a satirical periodi ...

's anthology, ''Poems by Eminent Ladies'' (1755); Thomas Amory's ''Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain'' (1755); and ''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.'' (Anon; 1766). In 1774, Mary Scott published ''The Female Advocate; a poem. Occasioned upon reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead'' (London: Joseph Johnson) in which she expresses her "grateful pleasure" to Duncombe, as well as her desire to recognize a further group of writers: she includes above fifty, three of whom Duncombe had recognized: Chapone,

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

, and

. All these texts taken together, according to Betty Schellenberg, indicate the broad cultural significance of women's authorship by the mid-eighteenth century.Schellenberg, Betty A. "The Professional Female Writer." ''The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789, Cambridge''. Edited by Catherine Ingrassia. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Writers named in ''The Feminead''

Etexts

Digitized version
of Augustan Reprint Society edition (1981) available at the

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Digitized version of 2nd edition
available at

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References

External links