玛丽·查德利夫人传记

诗人的传记

作为一名虔诚的英国圣公会教徒，查德利自学了宗教、科学和哲学著作。作为当代玛丽·阿斯特尔(Mary Astell)的粉丝，或许还认识她。这两个女人，连同伊丽莎白·托马斯，“克林斯”、“克洛丽莎”、“露辛达”和“尤金妮亚”，构成了以德莱顿为中心的文学圈子的一部分。与两代前的纽卡斯尔公爵夫人玛格丽特·卡文迪什不同，查德利夫人确实有一个支持女权主义的女性朋友网络。我们对她和她丈夫的关系一无所知:她发表的和未发表的关于她个人生活这方面的文章都对这个问题保持沉默。一些作者认为她的婚姻并不幸福。然而，她的丈夫究竟是厌恶女性的乡下乡巴佬的榜样——为《女士们》辩护的约翰·布鲁特爵士(Sir John Brute)，还是一个懂得欣赏拥有美丽心灵的女人的智慧的情人，我们不得而知。我们只知道他允许她在他生前写作和出版3部女权主义作品并允许在她死后再版。虽然她直到去世前10年才开始出版任何作品，但在她去世前，这些作品被重印了4次。她的诗歌在整个18和19世纪被各种选集引用，事实上，直到我们自己的时代，她的名字在其间的岁月里继续毫无保留地出现在重要诗人的传记词典中。 Through exploring human reactions many of her poems had appeal to both men and women. Yet, her feminist poems continued to be reprinted, too. Her best remembered feminist work, The Ladies Defence: or the Bride-Woman's Counsellor answered: A Poem. In a Dialogue Between Sir John Brute, Sir William Loveall, Melissa, and a Parson (1701, verse), is a response to a wedding sermon given by John Sprint in 1699 in which he advocated woman's total subjection to her husband. (Eugenia and Elizabeth Thomas also responded to this sermon.) She explored a number of themes that still resonate with feminists: "the negative attitudes of males and their demeaning expectations of women; the role of the church in propagating pernicious ideas about women, couched as protection of public morals; the duties of a wife to be silent, abjectly obedient, and tolerant of physical and psychological abuse; and the conventional dismissal of female education." Deeply untrusting of men and fully aware of the unequal and unfair power structure in the family, Chudleigh believed that only single women could freely persue intellectual interests. Her three feminist works, The Ladies' Defence, Poems on Several Occasions (1703), which celebrates the friendships women have with one another, and Essays upon Several Subjects (1710) have been reprinted by Oxford University Press