In this study of newly recovered works by British women, Kathryn Freeman traces the literary relationship between women writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, otherwise known as the Orientalists. By contrast to their male counterparts, who tended to mirror the Orientalist distortions of India, women writers like Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sydney Owenson, Mariana Starke, Eliza Fay, Anna Jones, and Maria Jane Jewsbury interrogated these distortions from the perspective of gender. This book revises the Romantic paradigm of canonical writers as replicators of Orientalists’ cultural imperialism to accommodate the differences between male and female authors with respect to India.
Kathryn Freeman is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami in the fields of British Romanticism, Orientalism, Blake studies, and women’s literature. She is the author of Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas (SUNY 1997). She is currently completing A Guide to William Blake, a companion to Blake’s cosmology and historical context, and is at work on a book about the relationship among gender, creativity, and epistemology in Coleridge’s poetics, entitled,“The New Moon with the Old Moon in her Arms”: Phases of the Imagination in Coleridge.
