Memoirs of Scandalous Women

Contents

Volumes 1–3

Teresa Constantia Phillips, An Apology For The Conduct of Mrs Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748)
Teresia Constantia Phillips’s notorious memoir appealed to readers to be judge and jury in the case made against her reputation and character. Raped as a teenager by a ‘Mr Grimes’, and forced into a succession of sexual liaisons to alleviate her financial distress, Phillips set out to wrest control of her public image, and to challenge those individuals who defined a woman’s worth solely in sexual and economic terms. One of the best-known and notorious memoirs of the eighteenth century, Phillips’s Apology has emerged in recent scholarship as a text that is important not only for its provocative challenge to sentimental constructions of female character, but for its contribution to the development of autobiography as a modern literary form. Memoirs of Scandalous Women makes this intriguing and influential text available to scholars in a modern edition for the first time.

Volume 4

Elizabeth Gooch, The Life of Mrs Gooch (1792)
A wealthy heiress who later turned to writing poetry and novels to support herself, Elizabeth Villa-Real was married to the adulterous William Gooch after a whirlwind six-week courtship. Deemed an ‘incumbrance’ once her fortune had been secured, William Gooch cast doubt upon Elizabeth’s fidelity an eventually abandoned her in France, with her reputation in tatters. Gooch’s Life, like her 1788 Appeal to the Public, catalogues her disastrous marriage as well as the sexual misadventures and financial hardships she experienced in both France and England after being discarded by her husband. Though Gooch made no secret that her memoir was written out of financial ‘NECESSITY’, like Phillips, she wrote also to demand ‘justice’ for herself and to defend her honour as a woman lacking protection and guidance. Her spirited memoir reveals and contests the sexual double standards that lay at the heart of eighteenth-century culture.

Volume 5

Christian Davies, The Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies (1740)
Hannah Snell, The Female Soldier (1750)
Francoise de Houssay, A Narrative of the Sufferings of Louise Francoise de Houssay, de Bannes (1796)
Mary Ann Talbot, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Ann Talbot (1809)
This volume brings together the memoirs of four women, who, for love, revenge or survival, masqueraded as men and entered military service. These extraordinary, popular, and often fiercely patriotic narratives offer fascinating insights into such conflicts as the War of Spanish Succession and the French Revolution, and force twenty-first-century readers to question the perceived rigidity of gender, class and sexual norms during the second half of the long eighteenth century.

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