Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers.

Throughout the 1980s, scholars debated Alexander Pope s attitude toward women by applying such critical methods as Marxist or deconstructionist theories to his texts. In this book, Claudia N. Thomas instead adopts reader-response theory in order to present what she regards as a more accurate analysis, mindful of the historical reception of Pope s various works.Thomas specifically responds to modern allegations that Pope was a misogynist and a literary victimizer of women. If Pope thought women inconsequential, she argues, why did he bother to cultivate a female audience? Furthermore, how did eighteenth-century women readers receive his writings?Thomas answers these questions by examining the literary responses to Pope of his eighteenth-century women readers: their prose responses to Pope, their poems addressed to him or replying to his poems, and their poems strongly influenced by him. These responses not only clarify Pope s works and their relation to cultural history; they also advance women s literary history by reconstructing the female experience of eighteenth-century culture.A surprising amount of testimony survives to illuminate the ways eighteenth-century women read Pope. Women referred to, quoted, and commented on his poems and letters in a variety of writings: diaries, letters, travel books, translations, essays, poems, and novels. They wrote poems of praise and criticism and designed companion pieces to his poems. A number of women poets learned their craft by studying his work; their poems frequently appropriate and recontextualize his themes, language, and imagery.For many women, a response to Pope was a reaction to cultural issues ranging from women s emotional and intellectual qualities to their creative capacity. Women s responses to Pope demonstrate that they were often shrewdly critical of his gendered rhetoric, yet in contrast, women often claimed him as a sympathetic ally in their quests for education and for a more dignified role in their culture."