Jonathan Sadow, English, presented the paper “Networks in the Real and Fictional Worlds of Eliza Kirkham Mathews” as part of the panel “Publishing Women in the Long Eighteenth Century” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ annual conference on March 31, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland. Sadow contrasts the feminist picture of the semi-autobiographical protagonist—an aspiring woman writer—in Mathews’ novel What Has Been (1801) with the misogynist portrait of Eliza Kirkham Mathews painted posthumously by her husband’s second wife in her biography of her husband, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (1837). At the same time, the biography’s reproduction of letters and anecdotes allows us to recover an account of Eliza Kirkham Mathews’ life and some of the avenues women used to publish and promote their work at the end of the eighteenth century.
Contact: Jonathan Sadow, English, jonathan.sadow@oneonta.edu
The Oneonta Bulletin | SUNY Oneonta 