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Born in a convent to an unwed mother before adoption was legal in
Ireland, Maura O'Sullivan was raised by a "nursing mother." She
knew she was different from her two older siblings but her history
was never discussed in her childhood home. Her journey in the
pursuit of happiness took her from Ireland to England and finally
to America. While living in America Maura got what she wanted most
in life: a family of her own. "I was going to have a baby whether I
was married or not, it was just that important to me," she says.
Maura married her American sweetheart, and they raised four
daughters together. Jack provided well for his family but he didn't
make life easy for Maura and their children. Even so, Maura found a
way to live the life she wanted. Socrates famously said the
unexamined life is not worth living, but it's one thing to review
the details of your life in the privacy of your own home; it's
another to share your story with anyone who wants to read about it.
As openly and as honestly as she can, Maura gives us the gift of an
examined life. By doing so she enriches all of us and will continue
to do so long after she takes off on her last great adventure.
In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were at
the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each
other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who
provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction
to Williams when he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by
the time he got there). By the end of the decade Smith and Williams
were being cited together more pejoratively, as two of a number of
women who came to stand for the amoral, sexually suspect and
politically naïve English ‘Jacobins’ who were vilified in the
conservative press. Neither were in fact ‘Jacobins’ but they
were revolutionary. This book looks at how Smith and Williams
earned such reputations and at the politics and poetics of the
works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed Romantic and
Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise.
When Marge Hall walked up to Roy Johnson and asked him to dance she
had no idea what she was about to set in motion. Roy, the boy who
skipped school to go fishing, picked blueberries in the mountains,
and skated on the frozen ponds of Connecticut, decided right then
he was going to marry her. But before he could make Marge his wife,
he had a war to fight, letters to write, and doubts to erase, and
when he returned from China, where he served as a radio operator on
a B-24 bomber, his dream came true. Shortly after their wedding on
November 11, 1944, Roy set a much harder goal for himself. "My one
and only purpose in life is to make you a good husband, "he told
Marge. For the next 65 years he tried his best to do just that.
Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.
Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s
and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic
literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been
overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and
exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition.
The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women
such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen
Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national
literary representation. As women were cast into the feminine,
maternal role in Romantic national discourse, women like these who
defined themselves in other terms found themselves exiled -
sometimes literally - from the nation. These wandering women did
not rest easily in the family-romance of Romantic nationalism nor
could they be reconciled with the models of literary authorship
that emerged in the 1790s.
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