Reading with Aunt Bunty: Intergenerational Feminism and Eighteenth-Century Studies

This essay asks: what might an intergenerational reading practice look like for feminist critics working in eighteenth-century studies? What could be learned from reading the political and institutional conditions that have shaped reading practices, past and present, in relation to each other? I consider, here, the case of Q.D. Leavis. Reading Leavis, as well as other women who studied at Cambridge in the early twentieth century, shows me how profoundly I have been shaped by Virginia Woolf’s characterization of the university and literary history’s marginalization of women writers. What would it mean to consider the eighteenth century through the lens of Leavis, rather than Woolf? What might feminist criticism gain from reflecting on the rhetorical modes and affects that shape its engagements with those who came before us?