What is solitude? History gives many answers. In eighteenth-century Britain, solitude was regarded with marked ambivalence.
Christian believers revered it as a site of spiritual communion, and poets celebrated it as a school of creative genius. Political moralists, by contrast, denounced solitaries as ‘unnatural’ and ‘selfish’, and doctors warned that too much solitude engendered madness.
In 1795 the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, travelling alone in Scandinavia, described solitude as a state of emotional abandonment, a ‘separation of soul’ that she found acutely painful. Yet she also wrote lyrically about the joys of solitude, the self-expanding freedoms and opportunities it afforded.
In this lecture, Barbara Taylor follows Wollstonecraft on her Scandinavian journey, using her experiences and reflections on solitude as a route into an investigation of the complex relationships between self, psyche and history.
Barbara Taylor is an intellectual and cultural historian, author of Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century (Virago 1983), which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and Mary Wollstonecraft and the
Feminist Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2003). She is an editor of History Workshop Journal, and co-director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre (UEL).
Between 1998 and 2001 she directed a Leverhulme-funded international research project on gender and Enlightenment (Women, Gender and Enlightenment, co-eds Knott and Taylor, Palgrave 2005).
Barbara has held many research awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Barbara is currently writing a history of solitude in Enlightenment Britain.
All Welcome, admission FREE.
For details and registration, contact Franc gooding 020 8223 2884 or email: f.gooding@uel.ac.uk
For travel information to our Docklands Campus see: http://www.uel.ac.uk/about_uel/why_uel/docklands.htm
© 2008
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