Frances Wright's <i>A Few Days in Athens</i> : Feminist History, Epicureanism, and the Scottish Enlightenment

This essay reads Frances Wright's A Few Days in Athens (1822) as a contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment's larger engagement with Epicurean thought and positions it as a response to James Mylne, Thomas Brown, Thomas Reid, and David Hume. Wright's engagement with Epicureanism can be traced to her studies with Mylne, her great uncle, and her experiences in his Glasgow household. After situating A Few Days in Athens within the Scottish Enlightenment and untangling its complicated publishing history, this essay centers the text's discussion of ‘virtuous pleasure’ and the greatest advocate of this Epicurean idea in Wright's tract, Leontium. In her study of Hellenistic philosophy, Wright uncovered Leontium, a historical analogue for the woman philosopher and a documented member of Epicurus's Garden. Through Leontium, Wright adapts and blends Epicurean ideas and Scottish Enlightenment thought to imagine women as philosophers and sketch a philosophy of embodiment distinct from that of many of her contemporaries. Ultimately, Epicurus provided Wright with a language for virtue, one that includes embracing pleasure, the senses and embodiment, not as practices of hedonism but as tools for measuring the individual and the social good.