Material Enlightenment

In this ambitious book, Joanna Wharton explores the pioneering work undertaken by women writers in late eighteenth-century Britain to establish the empirical study of the science of mind. Their subjects for investigation were nothing less than the emergence of thought and feeling, of attention and motivation, and the building blocks of social identity and interaction: what can now be seen as the early history of the discipline of psychology. They discovered their qualifications as investigators in the terms of their own exclusion from public and professional life: in the domestic scope of women’s activity and, specifically, the task, enjoined on their sex, to nurture the earliest stages of human development. The women writers considered here—Anna Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth—did not constitute a movement; for example, they differed markedly in their views on politics and religion and in their own life experiences. But they were

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