Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings, or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings, or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences is the first collection of biographies by writers or supporters of literature in the English-speaking world, published in 1752 by the biographer and antiquarian George Ballard was compiled and published.

content

The only work that Ballard should ever publish had been made possible for him primarily through subscriptions from a number of wealthy and culture-promoting women of high society, some of whom had also promoted himself in the past and were now listed at the beginning of the work. He dedicated the large volume volume to Mrs. Talbot from Kineton , the wife of an Anglican cleric, who had promoted him at an early age, and Mary Delany . He listed the biographies chronologically, and in some sections you can also find excerpts of the life descriptions of additional people. In his foreword, Ballard expressly regretted that he could not have captured more images of life, but sometimes the sources available to him simply would not have been sufficient. For example, he should have done without Lady Mary Wroth for lack of biographical data.

His work was also made possible by the other material collections of elementary school teacher Sarah Chapone and the notebook entries of his former discoverer, the Anglo-Saxon teacher , Elizabeth Elstob .

expenditure

  • George Ballard: Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences. Printed by W. Jackson, for the author, Oxford 1752. Digitized
  • Ruth Perry (Ed.): George Ballard - Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences. Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1985.

Covered biographies

George Ballard: Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences. 1752

reception

Ruth Perry put forward the theory that Ballard identified himself strongly with the female personalities he portrayed because, because of his simple origins, he had experienced social restrictions as well as the women he portrayed because of their gender. Thus, he highlighted their spiritual achievements wherever he found them. In addition, in Margaret Ezell's opinion, Ballard developed, based on his experience as an object of patronage by benevolent gentlemen and gentlewomen of the upper class - a perceptual model of literary education, according to which education and authorship are to be pursued by the upper and middle classes, designed for the benefit of the writer and his circle around him, but not intended for the general public or even the lower social classes. In addition, virtue and modesty are ultimately decisive for the success of women writers.

Even if the entire work consisted more of excerpts than transcriptions , this collection of biographies on the 64 women depicted, each preceded by an annotated biographical summary, was of immense influence from the 18th to the 20th century: Horace Walpoles A Catalog of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland and Ireland (1806), Jane Williams The Literary Women of England (1861), Myra Reynolds The Learned Lady in England (1920), and Doris Stenton's The English Women in History (1957) all knew what they were Ballards for Owed memoirs .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patricia Demers: Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2005, p. 8.
  2. ^ Alison Booth: How to make it as a woman: collective biographical history from Victoria to the present. University of Chicago Press, Chicago a. a. 2004, p. 349.
  3. ↑ Josephine A. Roberts (Ed.): The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1985, p. 3.
  4. ↑ Ruth Perry: George Ballard's Biographies of Learned Ladies. In: Biography in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by JD Browning, Garland, New York 1980, p. 90.
  5. ↑ Margaret Ezell: Writing Women's Literary History. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993, p. 87.
  6. ↑ See Linda Zionkowski: Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784. Palgrave, New York 2001, p. 250.
  7. ↑ See Patricia Demers: Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2005, p. 8.
  8. ↑ Also basis for Helga Schwalm: one's own life and that of others: biographical identity drafts in English literature of the 18th century. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, p. 388.