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Friends of our captivity: nature, terror and refugia in romantic women's literature

Hunt, Stephen E.

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Authors

Stephen E. Hunt



Contributors

Teresa Gomez Reus
Editor

Aranzazu Usandizaga
Editor

Abstract

This essay explores the way that four Romantic women writers confronted perilous situations involving physical captivity, personal trauma and depression through engagement with the natural world. Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith accompanied their husbands in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison. Helen Maria Williams was held captive in the Luxembourg Prison in Robespierre’s France. Mary Wollstonecraft also experienced and survived the Paris of the Terror but suffered protracted depression that culminated in two suicide attempts in the years that followed. Resilience derived from engagement with the natural world and transformed by the literary imagination helped these writers to cope with intensely threatening and disempowering spaces. Robinson, Smith and Williams in particular reiterate their desire for shared experience of the natural world. Such writings provide a counterpoint to more familiar Rousseauan and Wordsworthian evocations of the natural world, often predicated on the masculine convention of the solitary wanderer. For example a letter by Charlotte Smith fondly embraces the reassuring familiarity of the countryside and reunion with her family in a single conceit. While such a gendered distinction between the mutual and the solitary appreciation of nature is complicated by Wollstonecraft’s autobiographical essays these also strive to open up imaginative space for recuperation by negotiating the border between the natural and cultural.

Citation

Hunt, S. E. (2008). Friends of our captivity: nature, terror and refugia in romantic women's literature. In T. G. Reus, & A. Usandizaga (Eds.), Inside Out Women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private space (273-296). Amsterdam: Rodopi

Publication Date Jan 1, 2008
Deposit Date Apr 23, 2010
Publicly Available Date Dec 2, 2016
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 4
Pages 273-296
Series Title Spatial Practices An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature
Series Number 4
Book Title Inside Out Women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private space
ISBN 9789042024410
Keywords Mary Robinson (1758-1800), Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), Romanticism, French Revolution, natural environment, resilience, prison, well-being
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1019309
Publisher URL http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=SPATIAL+4
Related Public URLs http://www.rodopi.nl/

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