1 - Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee

Summary

FEMALE AUTHORSHIP

Clara Reeve made her literary debut in a blaze of bad temper and recrimination. Original Poems on Several Occasions (1769), signed C.R., opens with a dedication to the Honourable Mrs Stratford, expressing all the proper respect due to rank. But the tone changes in the ‘Address to the Reader’ which follows. Reeve explains that the first intention of the volume was to publish the libretti of two oratorios she had written, both on biblical subjects. She had had good hopes that the first, on Ruth, would be accepted by a composer, but halfway through a rival work on the same subject had appeared. The second, on Absolom's rebellion, was actually requested, but in this case the composer had been so dishonourable as to accept another text, and so all her labours were lost. Currently, however, it is under consideration elsewhere, which prevented her from including it here. The question was now whether to proceed with the present publication or abandon it, but on the advice of friends, she has filled up the gap with miscellaneous poems. And so it goes on. This monody is typical of Reeve's style of direct authorial address. She is at once the most confiding and defensive of writers. Too often she has been dismissed as having about her a tiresome odour of sanctity; what has been missed is the rather more piquant odour of acrimony.

Another misconception about Reeve is connected with a poem in this collection, ‘To My Friend Mrs. - - - - -, on her Holding an Argument in Favour of the Natural Equality of Both the Sexes. Written in the Year 1756’, namely that she was an apologist for the subordination of women, and can therefore be considered a social conservative. This reading depends on ignoring the poem's tone of playful irony. In the poem, the shortage of women writers is traced to the qualities of the inspirational Helicon spring of Greek myth, which:

Produces very strange effects,

On the weak brains of our soft sex;

Works worse vagaries in the fancy,

Then Holland's gin, or royal Nancy.