Enfilade

From Bloomsbury (and on sale for $76 until the 10th December) . . .

Heidi Strobel, The Art of Mary Linwood: Embroidery, Installation, and Entrepreneurship in Britain, 1787–1845 (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1350428096, $120.

The first book on Leicester textile artist Mary Linwood, with a catalogue of her work

When British textile artist and gallery owner Mary Linwood died in 1845 just shy of 90 years old, her estate was worth the equivalent of £5,199,822 in today’s currency. As someone who made, but did not sell, embroidered replicas of famous artworks after artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, and Morland, how did she accumulate so much money? A pioneering woman in the male-dominated art world of late Georgian Britain, Linwood established her own London gallery in 1798 that featured copies of well-known paintings by these popular artists. Featuring props and specially designed rooms for her replicas, she ensured that her visitors had an entertaining, educational, and kinetic tour, similar to what Madame Tussaud would do one generation later. The gallery’s focus on picturesque painters provided her London visitors with an idyllic imaginary journey through the countryside. Its emphasis on quintessentially British artists provided a unifying focus for a country that had recently emerged from the threat of Napoleonic invasion.

This book brings to the fore Linwood’s gallery guides and previously unpublished letters to her contemporaries, such as Birmingham inventor Matthew Boulton and Queen Charlotte. It also includes the first and only catalogue of Linwood’s extant and destroyed works. By examining Linwood’s replicas and their accompanying objects through the lens of material culture, the book provides a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on women and cultural agency in the early 19th century.

Heidi A. Strobel is Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs at the University of North Texas.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Plates
List of Figures

Introduction
1  Embroidery, Education, and Commerce: Linwood’s Early Years
2  The Pantheon and Hanover Square Exhibitions
3  Portraiture, Publications, and Promotion
4  The Leicester Square Gallery: Performing British Patriotism
5  Of Students and Studying: The Academic Tradition and the Scripture Room
6  Linwood’s Legacies

Appendix: Catalogue of Linwood’s Textiles
Notes
Bibliography

First published in 2019, Heroines and Local Girls was awarded the 2022 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame; it’s  scheduled for paperback release in February.

Pamela Cheek, Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0812251487 (hardcover), $85 / ISBN: 978-1512826166 (paperback), $30.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others’ works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women’s literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women’s writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women’s writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women’s writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace’s segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women’s writing to this day.

Pamela L. Cheek is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of New Mexico and author of Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.

c o n t e n t s

Preface

1  Networks of Women Writers, circa 1785–87
2  Two Quarrels
3  Ravishing and Romance Language
4  The Repertoire of the School for Girls
5  Heroines and Local Girls
6  Heroines in the World

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments