Speaking Volumes

An interdisciplinary study of women and language in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this book uses language texts, schoolbooks, diaries, letters, conduct books, and works of literature to show how 18th-century English women used "woman's language" while insisting that gender was not the most salient feature of their identities. An interdisciplinary study of women and language in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Speaking Volumes focuses on the connections that contemporaries made between speech and reading. It studies the period's discourses on "woman's language" and contrasts them with the linguistic practices of individual women. The book also argues that the oral performance of literature was important in fostering domesticity and serving as a means for women to practice authoritative speech. Utilizing a range of evidence gleaned from language texts, schoolbooks, diaries, letters, conduct books, and works of literature (notably the novels of Jane Austen), the author shows how eighteenth-century English women strategically used the stereotype of "woman's language" while insisting implicitly that gender was not always the most salient feature of their identities. After an overview of the discourse on eighteenth-century women's speech, which emphasizes how women were lumped together as a single, deficient class of speakers, the remaining chapters each center on an individual woman to examine the historical forces her speech illuminates. The author describes Quaker language as a sociolect with norms different from those of the "polite" world, and shows how one speaker, Amelia Opie, utilized a highly mediated form of language that situated her strategically as either a Quaker or a "polite" woman. In considering the…