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One-day conference at the King's Manor

4th June 2005

WOMEN'S LETTERS 1750-1820

Keynote Speaker: Vivien Jones (University of Leeds)

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Speakers:
Kate Davies (York)
Loraine Fletcher (Reading)
Catriona Kennedy (Huddersfield)
Ruth Larsen (Derby)
Emma Major (York)
Nicole Pohl (Northampton)

This day conference presents an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of letters and women's writing 1750-1820. The conference speakers explore local, national and international epistolary connections through a range of familial, social political and literary themes. The eighteenth-century letter appears in myriad forms, and is central to literary, social and political networks of the period. Whether read in familial and social circles, in novels, as circular 'public letters', or in political exhanges, the letter offers a key form of cultural exchange. Its ubiquity and importance in eighteenth-century life make it arguably the defining genre of the period.

PROGRAMME

9.30-10.00 Registration

10.00-11.00 Keynote Speaker:
Vivien Jones (Leeds) 'The Evidence of "Important Nothings": Jane Austen's Letters'

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-12.45 Letters and their Readers:
Loraine Fletcher (Reading): 'Persuasions: Charlotte Smith's Polemical Letters'
Ruth Larsen (Derby): 'Weights and Measures: an Archaeology of Elite Women's Letters in Yorkshire

12.45-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.15 Revolutionary Letters:
Kate Davies (York): 'Revolutionary Correspondence: Reading Mercy Otis Warren and Catharine Macaulay'
Emma Major (York): '"the Gates of Hell": Elizabeth Montagu and Sarah Scott in the 1790s'

3.15-3.45 Coffee

3.45-5.00 Epistolary Exchanges:
Nicole Pohl (Northampton): '"Perfect Reciprocity": Salon Culture and Epistolary Conversations'
Catriona Kennedy (York) on Irish women's letters