A Feminine Enlightenment combines sensitive close reading of little-known texts with a perceptive overview of both eighteenth-century and current critical debates about the relationship between gender, history and economic progress. This book builds upon a large body of feminist scholarship but takes this work in exciting new directions, leading it into an important new phase of development.
Dr. Elizabeth Eger, King’s College London
It succeeds triumphantly, partly because of JoEllen DeLucia’s readiness to cross the boundaries which constrain so many approaches to this period. She ranges across Scottish, English, and Irish literature, explores the complex connections between genres, and confronts contemporary interpretations of the Enlightenment in Britain, including feminist interpretations.
- Jane Rendall, University of York, Eighteenth-Century Scotland. 29, Spring 2015
a valuable and original study which was deservedly selected by the editors, Ian Duncan and Penny Fielding, to head the new series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism.
- Caroline Franklin, Swansea University, European Romantic Reviews
...an enlightening and perceptive book.
- Nicole Pohl, Oxford Brookes University, Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Offers a fresh and engaging account of the role played by women writers and readers in a genealogy of Enlightenment thought that is often considered not just predominantly but almost exclusively masculine.
- Jenny Davidson, Columbia University, Studies in English Literature, Volume 56, Number 3
[A]n important contribution to scholarship on the relationship of women writers to the Scottish Enlightenment.
- E. J. Clery, University of Southampton, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (35.1)