Controversy and the Hostile Reader: The Appeal of George Anne Bellamy's Apology

• Published in: Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period Vol. 31; no. 4; pp. 499 - 516
• Main Author: Orr, Leah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.10.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: autobiography; criticism; eighteenth-century literature; marginalia; Readers; reception studies

This essay examines the ways that controversial texts were read by reader-critics who sought to engage with their reading in new ways in the eighteenth century. It takes as its primary example An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (1785), the autobiography of a woman actor in mid-eighteenth...